Breaking News: Major Power outages in many cities

[Wombat]

Originally posted by Nowhere
The ending of the article to which Byock pointed is...amusing. Do they think that you up there have forgot how to live without air conditioning?

You're joking, but it's serious. Those buildings are huge, and you really can't get airflow without air conditioning. So, high summer heat + high humidity + asphalt jungle...yes, people will die from the heat, especially the elderly.

[GNEP]

Well it does indeed look like the effects are more serious than initial reports I saw indicated - I thought that power would be back up again soonish afterwards - clearly not the case. Hope everyone's OK there (not that anyone affected directly would be able to be on the internet...)

[thop]

Wombat, did you move? And yeah it looks to be serious. Good the internet survived

[Jon P. Inghram]

Now they're saying lightning did it. Unless they had some other malfunctions that had the system in such a delicate condition, it doesn't bode well with the reliability of that power grid.

Now they're saying a fire at a powerplant near Niagara falls. Fire, lightning... same difference.

[mmp121]

How about this, a lightning strike started a fire, which got outta hand and caused a transformer to blow, and viola, instant cascading blackouts.

[ZokesPro]

If I was still in Belleville I'd be without power right now, glad i'm here instead of there.

(I imagine it got hit too cause it's the half way point between Toronto and Ottawa.)

[Jon P. Inghram]

The lightning thing seems rather unlikely after checking the weather... no storms in that area today. Probably just aliens.

[bsdgeek]

Oh the cascading power plant failure? A trifle... (See sig )

[Dr Mordrid]

I plugged it in....

I turned it on, and....

SHAAAZZZAAAAMMMMMM !!!!

Actually it wasn't a new system here, that's been up for a few days with no ill effects on homeland security....yet

Looks like it'll take a few days to find out what's going on. There was a news conference broadcast on our local emergency broadcast channel (WJR in Detroit) from Niagra Falls where the chief of the power system there stated that it was not a lightning strike or fire in a power plant or anything they can pinpoint right now.

They'll look through the records and figure it out after they get the lights back on. Estimates here in the Detroit area are that over 2.1 million households are without power and most won't get it back until early next week.

Here (30 miles s/w of Detroit) we were out for about 8 hours. I think the only reason we got it back so fast was that we're on the same grid as Metro Airport and the area HAZMAT headquarters.

Dr. Mordrid

[Dr Mordrid]

Originally posted by J1NG
Yeah, I often wonder what machines the Doc has that we might be only dreaming of having.

J1NG

If I told you I'd have to kill you

Dr. Mordrid

[The PIT]

I see the UK isn't the only country to have sucky systems.

Terrorists should be taking note.


I guess this is why there ain't many on Murc.

[Jon P. Inghram]

Interesting... it seems the people who are responsible for running the power grids are implying the system magicly turned off. Makes me think either there was some kind of "terror" related incident, or possibly that someone really, REALLY screwed up big time and/or... they're incompetent.

[LvR]

MSBlast anyone?

[Dr Mordrid]

Rolling blackouts don't need a virus or help. There was a similar blackout here in 1965 that started in the SAME area. Simon and Garfunkle immortalized this in their "Sounds of Silence".

Dr. Mordrid

[Brian Ellis]

Snowballing of outages are a known and normal effect. The key point is that it probably happened at a peak demand period. Rail transport (subway) would be gearing up for rush hour, lifts working full blast to take people out of their 33rd storey offices to street level, building chillers working to max, kids and momma home from school/natter with neighbours, switching on aircons, TVs, preparing dinner etc.

Now imagine a theoretical grid with 20 power stations with a capacity of 1 GW each and a demand of 19.5 GW, running smoothly. For any reason, one station goes off line. The remaining ones struggle valiantly to make up the shortfall and the voltage and frequency drop. This would cause that grid to be isolated from a national grid. The power stations have automatic shutdown systems if the frequency drops below (probably) 59.5 Hz or if the alternators have a substantial current overload, otherwise the turbines would whizz up to critical speed++ if there were a sudden loss of connection. In turn, every fail-safe device would operate, so that sub-stations would all be switched off automatically. To start up such a system from scratch again would be a horrendous job.

In this case, the Niagara hypothesis is plausible as both US and Canadian grids were outed. I know there are a number of interconnections, but the Niagara HE stations are designed to feed both countries.

Note that several nuke stations are on this grid and presumably all shut down without incident.

A group within the IEE discussed terrorist attacks on the UK grid. It transpired that the simultaneous attack of 6 unmanned substations on the grid would probably deprive the whole country of power for several weeks. Two anti-tank rockets into the main and back-up transformers of each would do the trick, from a distance. More subtle, but more easily repairable, would be to drill a 10 mm hole into the bottom of each transformer casing, so that the cooling oil drained out; even this would be disastrous. I'm quite sure that terrorists are all aware of the vulnerability of power systems. Pylon-blowing has been commonly used in many countries, such as S. Africa and N. Ireland, on a lesser scale.