Major power surge in NY? (Blackout is in NYC, Detroit, Ottawa and Toronto, per Fox News)

8-14-03 | Joe Hadenuf

[Joe Hadenuf]

Hannity station went dead for about 20 seconds. Said he had never seen anything like it.

[Alberta's Child]

Did you see or hear any of the footage from this evening when Bloomberg ventured out of City Hall to mingle with crowds of people and "reassure" them as they made their way toward the Brooklyn Bridge?

He ended up getting heckled so badly by the crowd that he fled back into City Hall.

[FairOpinion]

Thanks for your detailed explanation. It was helpful.

It shows how vulnerable our entire grid is, a slight imbalance can wreak havoc.

[ATOMIC_PUNK]

Lights are out but no ones home! they're all in the street !

[Joe Hadenuf]

Thanks for that....

[Myrddin]

Could you tell me what SCADA stands for?

If memory serves it is Supervision, Control and Data Acquisition. A term describing a computer system that monitors sensors and controls devices remotely. A power company might use it to control switching of power paths, monitoring of voltages and currents. I did work in Florida for a water control district. That SCADA system monitored water levels, flow rates, salinity, turbidity, temperature, gate positions, and controlled pump motors. All the control was accomplished using a network of microwave data radios.

[ThirdMate]

Please see my #3094. I think we are saying the same thing, but you explain it better, and I am speculating the triggering event is malicious.

[HardStarboard]

>>>And on a hot, high-demand day like today must have been, I think the margins would have been very tight to begin with.<<<

With some 3000 odd posts I assume someone else has make the point (but I can't resist)...in just a couple short months an acknowledged expert in power generation and blackout problems will become available in the West and may be interested in finding enployment in New York to help out with the grid failures there.

[Conservababe]

No, I am sorry I missed it, and it doesn't surprise me a bit. LOL

[CedarDave]

And WNBC on the net is out again, and I'm outa here. This thread has been a great source of news, tech info, and rumors the past few hours. Will pick it up in the a.m.

[FairOpinion]

It sounds like a plausible scenario. I think with that scenario, when they go back, they may not even be able to tell that it wasn't a malfunction but a deliberate act, which started it all.

Back to the question that why don't we have more safeguards, that actually work?

[Dolphy]

Thanks for the information. Having read it I can see why the Democrats are shouting Enron. It's so much easier to chant Bush-Enron than trying to understand what may have actually happened.

[null and void]

Lights are out but no ones home! they're all in the street!

The better to be exposed...

[fatima]

Alberta's Child,Really,Hard to watch it all but heard him on TV and Radio,he talked to us as children.I think I'll smoke.

[FairOpinion]

"an acknowledged expert in power generation and blackout problems will become available in the West and may be interested in finding enployment in New York to help out with the grid failures there. "

---

LOL! You should have listened to Davis today, I think he was on Larry King, and was exactly talking as he were an expert, it would have been funny, if it hadn't been so pathetic.

[Fellow Traveler]

Actually three external things can cause a generating plant to go off line. I won't go through the internal ones because their are literally hundreds. The three externals are Frequency problems, Voltage, and load imbalance.

The thing to realize is that what we are experiencing is a fluke. The electric grid responds differently to equipment malfunctions depending on the precise operating conditions at that time. For someone to be able to know exactly how to hit us in a single spot at any given time and cause a cascade failure strikes me as highly unlikely. Not impossible but very unlikely. That would mean that th grid was operating with a single contingency. That is a big no no sombodies head should roll.

I wonder what amount of spinning reserves were on line prior to this event. I will bet that somebody scrimped on the reserves. It used to be that spinning reserves were 10% or the size of the largest single unit on the grid, whichever was larger.

[Museum Twenty]

Well, it's a long time since 1977 and 1965.

I'd guess that (Niagara Falls!) step-by-step, inch-by-inch, the bean-counters whittled the safeguards away.

Maybe it is a situation where what is "acceptible" kept getting reduced. Kind of like the space shuttle Columbia. Seems like we kept "dumbing down" the acceptible margins for safety.

I can see it now: "So what if the specs say we need relays that react in 1 second? We put in a relay that reacts in 2 seconds, and it's been just fine. And then we put in one that reacts in 3 seconds. Again, it's just fine. Stop worrying about the specs -- look at the cost savings!"

So the standard for acceptible relays goes down. And all is well -- until the day when that 1 second relay is needed, and it isn't there.

This is just speculation on my part, but, no doubt, congressional hearings about the blackout are coming -- can't stop those guys (and gal). And the story will slowly leak out, explaining why the damage was so widespread -- and it will greatly resemble the post-mortem on Columbia.

Meanwhile, I want the focus to be on what caused the problem more than on why the safeguards failed. I am concerned that the scenario outlined in the Post story (see #2893) is what has occurred. If the terrorists could have caused the blackout, you know darned well they would.

By the way, on a lighter note, I find it interesting that the cascading stopped at Valley Forge. Perhaps the ghost of George Washington still watches over us! I sure hope so.

Regards!

[null and void]

Back to the question that why don't we have more safeguards, that actually work?

They DID work. Not a single generator got fried. Power will be back up in HOURS. A fried generator takes MONTHS to fix.

Saying the safegards didn't work is a bit like saying the airbags caused the collision...

[ThirdMate]

It just goes to show you that all systems are vunerable. Some congresscritter was calling the other day for SAM countermeasures on all civilian airliners, for who knows how many billion dollars.
I believe civil defense and homeland security is a pointless waste, far better to go get the bastards over there in such a way that those that remain alive are incapacitated with fear.

[Tamzee]

Safety steps stopped spread of outage.

Great article, thanks! As a Pennsylvanian, I'm one of the millions that those great folks protected in time :-)

[Mo1]

From another article

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/6535606.htm

(snip)


Jeff Dagle, an electrical engineer who has studied power reliability for the U.S. Department of Energy, said a lightning strike alone should not have caused the massive blackouts.

"My guess is that there were some other conditions there that made it ripe for this cascading event to occur," said Dagle, who works at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in Richland, Wash. "Maybe some critical equipment was out of service, or not enough reserve margin was available."