Posted on 12/18/2002 2:10:43 PM PST by Robert357
The CMRC reported the following outages for today (12/17 Daily Report):
Due to multiple Transmission outages in the ISO Control area they have declared a Restricted Maintenance Operation from 0600-2159 PST today.
Other Comments: The Pinto Phase Shifter is out of service due to possible oil leaks with no ETR.
Monday’s Notable Events: At 0800 MST the Laramie River-DJ 230-kV Line relayed to permanent fault. At 1905 MST the line was back in service. At 1042 PST the Midway-Vincent #3 500-kV Line relayed with the Midway-Vincent #1 line out of service for scheduled work. At 1125 the Midway-Vincent #1 Line was returned to service early due to 2 towers down on the #3 line and an ETR of 1 week for repairs. At 1335 PST the Vincent-Lugo #1 and #2 500-kV Lines relayed. At 1730 towers were reported to be down on both the #1 & #2 lines with and ETR (estimated time of repair) of 1 week for repairs.
The CMRC reported the following outages for today (12/18 Daily Report):
Due to multiple Transmission outages in the ISO Control area they have declared a Restricted Maintenance Operation from 0600-2159 PST today.
(Excerpt) Read more at wecc.biz ...
OK, what has happened to California's transmission electric system. There are multiple transmission line failures. The Southern California Vincent-Lugo lines are critical to moving vast amounts of electricity around LA Area.
As I have been saying California is on the ragged edge of massive blackouts.
Keep your camp lanterns and portable generators in good working order!
Meanwhile, the spot market price of electricity has gone up and there are stories running in trade journals about significant lack of percipitation (less than 50% of normal) in the upper Columbia drainage basin, which is very, very bad news for California and its dependence on PNW hydro power.
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Ahhh, Si! Like in Cuba, where the power goes off at night.
No, 100 MPH wind.
At first I thought it was the storm that PG&E suffered. Then I looked on my transmission map for the Vincent substation and was shocked to find it in the LA area. I don't know the cause of the multiple towers going down, but I sure will keep my eyes open and post it if I hear. Multiple towers should not fail at roughly the same time unless something really strange happens.
Wow that is hurican force winds. The destruction in many areas must be incredible.
Check the Antelope Valley in the High Desert. We were without electricity here for 11 hours and some of the power poles looked like a game of pickup sticks.
The picture is really impressive!
things will change with the next edition but great picture.
Seven transmission towers were toppled by the strong winds: four on the western side of the Valley near 95th Street West and three near Pearblossom Highway, about a mile or two from the 14 Freeway, said Alis Clausen, regional director of public affairs for Southern California Edison Co.
Great picture of what happened>
Steel Towers are suppose to be designed for reasonably high winds. Something must have gone really wrong or the winds must have been far higher than any on record in the area.
I don't know what the design wind load is on those towers. The ones in the pix you linked appeared to be guyed.
There is a lot of engineering that goes into designing a transmission tower. First, you have the un-symmetric cable tension, ice, and seismic loads, then you have the aerodynamics of the thing, which ultimately requires wind-tunnel testing. Also, the soil engineering for the foundation.
But hey, we don't need no steenkin' engineers any more. We'll just copy what everybody else has done...
Actually the still do need engineers. If the work is contracted out, it should have a professional engineers stamp on the drawings or SCE is taking some real risks. The industrial exemption allows SCE and other "industries" to use people who are not professional engineers as such, as long as some professional engineer is ocassionally around who reviews and directs things or forumlates standards.
Can you imaging the fun an ambulance chasing attorney would have asking an SCE witness about what standard industry design criteria are, and if the person doing the design were licensed by the state to do that kind of design and find out SCE had just copied a design from somewhere else on its system that looked good?
What we have seen up in the PNW, which is damn encouraging, is that some insurance companies (who are in financial tough times) are actually refusing to pay claims for things that can't be shown to have been designed by engineers. It has caused some folks up here to be stunned and realize that they really do need engineers for a whole bunch of things.
The following is from the Cal ISO Oasis Website operating notices:
Restricted Maintenance Operations CANCELLATION [200201361] Effective 12/17/2002 13:07 the California Independent System Operator has terminated Restricted Maintenance Operations. Restricted Maintenance Operations has been in effect since 12/17/2002 06:00. This message is from Market Operations at the California ISO. This notice cancels notice 200201359 Notice issued at: 12/17/2002 13:09 ---------------------------------- DISCLAIMER
I am getting to be suspicious.
Well, Kerchoff can't be fooled, so we should know shortly if the blackouts spread.
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