Investigators Pinpoint Cause of August Blackout

The Washington Post ^ | November 19, 2003 | Peter Behr

[John H K]

A U.S.-Canadian government investigation of the massive Aug. 14 power outage in the Northeast singles out a series of operators' mistakes, computer failures, violations of grid rules and inadequate maintenance by FirstEnergy Corp., the Akron-based utility serving northern Ohio, as the primary causes of the largest blackout in North American history...

[John H K]

Well, this will be sure to throw the "Everything bad that has happened anywhere in the country the last three years has been an Al Queda Terror Attack" crowd into a seething rage.....

[flamefront]

Excerpted:
A key failure involved the loss at 2:14 p.m. of alarm functions on computer systems in FirstEnergy's main control room that monitor power conditions on its grid. The alarm functions are meant to alert operators to take action to reduce overloading, the report said. With the alarms not working, operators missed readings on computer monitors that would have signaled the need to take emergency actions, the report said.

"Without a functioning alarm system, the FE [FirstEnergy] control area operators failed to detect the tripping of electrical facilities essential to maintain the security of their control area."

The loss of the alarm capability was followed by the loss of other computer functions in the control room. "However, for over an hour no one in the FE control room grasped that their computer systems were not operating properly,"

Perhaps not Al Qaeda, but it still stands as reported on September 1st that the
Blaster worm linked to US blackout

The W32.Blaster worm may have contributed to the cascading effect of the US blackout on 14 August, government and industry experts have revealed.

[Amerigomag]

If I understand this techno jargon the operators, with large readout gagues available to them scattered around the control rooms, relied on a fault warn systems, either audible or visual, to alert them to a major failure instead of glancing at the gagues from time to time (at least not for a minimum of one hour).

Sounds like union operators to me. "Wake me when the alarm goes off"