Posted on 08/22/2003 8:10:51 PM PDT by DittoJed2
Edited on 08/22/2003 8:50:18 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
Investigators uncovered fresh mysteries Monday about the way the electricity transmission grid operated in the eastern half of the United States last Thursday in the hours before the nation's largest power blackout occurred.
Meanwhile, businesses forced to shut down by the blackout returned to near normalcy Monday. Automakers began turning out cars again and Wall Street trading resumed on time. New York City officials estimated that businesses in the city lost about $1 billion in the blackout. Tallying the economic impact in Ohio and Michigan will take longer because power was slower to return in those areas.
The main unusual condition was that it appeared to be unusually dark.
A wide clear ROW used to be standard for utility lines, but because of environmental/aesthetic/NIMBY influences, some corridors are now being allowed to grow trees beneath the lines. In fact just today while driving I noticed a tower power line corridor with 20+ foot tall trees growing in the ROW and under the lines. Not the norm in DFW, but it was through a wooded, fairly recent upscale neighborhood.
PJM Interconnection and American Electric, among others, sealed themselves off from FirstEnergy keeping the lights on in Boston, Philadelphia and other cities. This article says Detroit didn't seal themselves off which spread into Ontario and then New York. Though they don't say, it seems like Ontario and New York should have also separated themselves.
I can buy that FirstEnergy failed on a large scale. (There are various stories of their persistent shortcomings in recent months.) But how does that explain Michigan, Ontario and New York failing while PJM and others were able to separate themselves?
Note to self: stop talking to microwave oven.
Such impatience. This reminds me of the "30 days since the end of the war and Iraq is still dangerous" crowd.
There is a mountain of evidence to pull together from thousands of data sites across two countries, eight states, quite a few utilities, about 100 power generating units, many many substations, several transmission companies, and too many power monitoring stations at universities, hospitals, schools, and businesses to count. We are talking about a situation where a millisecond can mean the difference between getting the events right or wrong, and most of the data time stamps are not synchonized that well. It is possible that subpoenas will need to be resorted to in some cases. This will all take time. Jumping to conclusions could be very embarrassing for the investigators and costly for some innocent people and/or companies. The investigators will be quiet and thorough. It's very frustrating I know, but it has to be that way to get it right.
Have you ever done a root cause analysis on a complicated system? Sometimes, the piece of data you need does not exist. So you have to infer it from several other pieces of data. Maybe some of those data bits are not available and have to be found through experimentation and analysis. The report will come. If the worm did it, I'm sure that that will come out too.
I've seen the same thing happen before too. It makes finding the cause very very challenging. When you come to the result, sometimes it's too unbelievable, but it DID happen. Too many people are coming to conclusions too fast without ANY hard facts to back the conclusion.
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