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Satellite Views Of The Blackout
An anonymous reader writes "These Before and After satellite views of the blackout, from the NOAA, show the geographic extent and intensity of the outage. Toronto, Ottawa, and Detroit seem the worst hit. Currently, a cnn article mentions that a reverse of power flow around Lake Erie may have caused an overload that triggered the programmed shutdown of the power grid. Would be interesting to know how the system and software works, but then again, that information could be dangerous in the wrong hands."
Im in Rhode Island. Its funny to see the blackout stop short of us :)
AntiRight, download now!
If a private citizen were to show the interconnections of the power grid on their website, what would happen? How long would it be before the government ordered him/her to remove that information in the interest of "National Security"? Why is it that CNN can show it freely? A similar map was being broadcast on TV all morning.
;) ) as soon as there were variants on the Blaster worm, a large section of the power went out? Hhhmmm...
And as for how the software works, it would be interesting to know just what OS the power company computers were running. Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist (well, ok, that's exactly what I'm trying to sound like
libertarianswag.com
these will help find out what caused the blackouts and what to do so they don't happen again?
Nearly any information, used incorrectly, maliciously, or by evil people can be devestating. Making information secret in the interest of "security" is a bad move. This is why many people advocate full disclosure, and why most security experts think that "security through obscurity" is a bad idea. Security should come because systems are strong, not because those systems are "secret".
i dont know how they referred to it precisely; it was something like reflection index. basically, it was all the stuff floating in the air. i'm not saying this is in any way cool, but it is interesting --
http://digitalsushi.com/wtcreflection.gif
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
And your telling me that publicising a blackout's cause as being one grid station, and then showing how its braught half of the northeast practically to a halt for a day or two isnt information in the wrong hands?
;-p
I'm just waiting for some half baked terrorist to whack off a couple of power grids now... Then our excuse of an administration will want to inspect everything about power right down the the electrons because of "national security"...
On a larger note, I'm surprised that nobody has really taken it seriously that there are other things in America then commercial airplanes that can bring this nation to its knees (like power, water, lack of a starbucks...)
We don't need an "overrated" so much as we need a "you completely missed the parent's point, dumbass..."
The NYTimes has a nice "comparator" gadget up on their front page right now. I had that idea last night, I cut up the before/after images in photoshop, put them on different layers, then blinked from Before to After. Unfortunately, the sat images have the overlay map placed inaccurately, so if you line up the two maps, the cities' positions jiggle. I lined them up so the map jiggled and the cities were in the correct positions. But it appears that the After shot has a slightly lower exposure, there is some noise and insensitivity near the edge of the data frame that seems to mask some of the light intensity in the recording.
Maybe these links may enlighten the situation:w =0
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/333505
and
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=257&ro
Blaming things on M$ is cool! So is using a dollar sign in M$. You are so cool! I want to be cool like you. Please. May I be so cool like you? You called someone a terrorist. That is cool too. Much respect to you sir.
I really do envy you and your extreme coolness. One day there will be a "+1 This guy is too cool for school" mod.
They got hit by 1.2 Jigawatts.
Somehow, even during the blackout, it doesn't look as bad as North Korea on a normal night.
I saw this link hours ago on FARK. Slashdot is getting behind.
Karma: Phantasmagorical
I did NOT learn everything I need to know in kindergarten.
I for one look forward to welcoming our new NOAA overlords. Let's give 3 cheers for the eye in the sky!
Whatever happened to UFO theories? Are we SURE that space aliens didn't cause this? Didn't the movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still" predict this nearly exactly?
maybe it was the power outage that caused YOU to FAIL IT!
I think the brightness in Boston is about the equivalent of all the light in North Dakota. And I'm sure just the area has more people, too.
+5, Female
I live in Cleveland, and while we were dark, the outlying suburbs had power, and Columbus certainly had power. Why is it dark in the after picture? Clouds?
"This is not a company that appears to be bothered by ethical boundaries."
Attorney General Mike Hatch on Microsoft
Not one, Twenty Seven. Twenty Seven Blocks?
Neo is on his way to the Source.
we have, its amazing how fast it comes tumbling down. hopefully we dont get ahead of ourselves...
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
I suppose that if we were to redesign the grid today, we would be able to prevent situations like this, or at least keep them local. Anyone know the projected costs for something like that? How comparable is it to the economic cost of losing power like we did this week?
If you put the images in two separate tabs, and switch between them you can see the continental drift ! If you stand in Soviet Russia at this moment, America is coming to you !!! (although not using the shortest path :)
It's a good thing all the green lights marking the state borders stayed on, or there could have been real trouble.
I cant see my house from here !
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
*viewing from space*
... !
Kodos: Foolish Earthlings! Relying on such a primitive thing as electricity!
Kang & Kodos: HA HA HA HA
*the ships lights go out*
Kodos: You forgot to feed the hamster again didn't you?
New York's governer blamed Canada for the cause of the outage but our Mayor Mel Lastman answered back with, "How many time have you seen the American's take the blame for anything?"
I would bet it was running just a test version of the kernel and a kernel panic occured and sent out a shutdown -now. It's funny anytime something goes wrong in the world some how slashdot manages to blame microsoft for it. Were they at fault for 9/11 as well? It's getting old guys.
Would be interesting to know how the system and software works, but then again, that information could be dangerous in the wrong hands.
Everything's dangerous in the wrong hands, but this is completely counter the ideas of the open source movement. I guess this brings up another question. Is it always good to open source? Or, are there times when it could potentially be a security problem. We're finding that open source products are just as secure as closed source product, if not more. But, what about this prevalent notion that physical security could be undermined by making things open?
http://www.genscape.com/blackout-replay.swf
/., the guys doing that run Suse ;-)
Is quite funky, and to befit
In the dark.
Sorry, I had to.
that's right. that little/increasing sense that somethings have gone terrorbully wrong, despite the endless greed/fear based ?pr? ?firm? generated spew that we are subjected to daily?
the lights are coming up now.
you can pretend all you want. our advise is to be as far away from the walking dead contingent as possible, when the big flash occurs. you wouldn't want to get any of that evile on you.
as to the free unlimited energy plan, as the lights come up, more&more folks will stop being misled into sucking up more&more of the infant killing barrolls of crudeness, & learn that it's more than ok to use newclear power generated by natural (hydro, solar, etc...) methods. of course more information about not wasting anything/behaving less frivolously is bound to show up, here&there.
cyphering how many babies it costs for a barroll of crudeness, we've decided to cut back, a lot, on wasteful things like giving monIE to felons, to help them destroy the planet/population.
no matter. the #1 task is planet/population rescue. the lights are coming up. we're in crisis mode. you can help.
the unlimited power (such as has never been seen before) is freely available to all, with the possible exception of the aforementioned walking dead.
consult with/trust in yOUR creator. more breathing. vote with yOUR wallet. seek others of non-aggressive intentions/behaviours. that's the spirit, moving you.
pay no heed/monIE to the greed/fear based walking dead.
each harmed innocent carries with it a bad toll. it will be repaid by you/us. the Godless felons will not be available to make reparations.
pay attention. that's definitely affordable, plus you might develop skills which could prevent you from being misled any further by phonIE ?pr? ?firm? generated misinformation.
good work so far. there's still much to be done. see you there. tell 'em robbIE.
Neo just chose to save Trinity instead of rebooting the matr...
NO CARRIER
I have a feeling that something that inaccurate isnt a danger to anyone except the guy looking to take out those grid controls somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico. He's gonna be out there a while.
frontline has an online show about cyberwar with a segment describing the vulnerability of the power grid.
There was a post on bugtraq about the possiblity that the blackout was caused by blaster since a SCADA-system(*) used RPC.
PBS Cyberwar has some intresting information about the possiblity of an attack against these kind of systems.
The effect of a large attack against infrastructure such as powergrids and waterplants together with more "normal" terrorist ways such as suicide-bombers and carbombs paints a frightning picture.
(*) SCADA : supervisory-control and data-acquisition systems that utility companies use to remotely monitor and control their operations.
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Ok I live in columbus and we were NOT effected by this blackout at all. I have no idea why the map shows us as blacked out. Any valid ideas?
Read the reports in various newspapers, you will have come across many articles saying how antiquated the power transmission system has become.
Power companies have specifically stated that putting in new power grids is very problematic because people don't want this anywhere near their property.
This view is exactly like those bastards at Cape Cod. They scream themselves hoarse that they are enviornmentalists and then fscking say no to wind mills 6 miles off the shore.
Same thing with this power grid. Companies that want to lay new power grids cannot go foward and lay lines because the residents will not waste anytime taking them to court. "We don't want it in our backyard".
Well, somebody has to pickup the cost.
Also, Canada has an excess of power generation capacity. If the US had better lines, it could have taken up the excess power Canada generates.
[ "The strain on transmission capacity is particularly acute in New York State, which is known in the industry for having far too few high-voltage power lines",
"community resistance to new lines has been high and continues to prevent new lines from being built, particularly in high-density areas like the northeast. While the federal government can step in and insist on construction of natural gas pipelines, it has no such power related to electrical transmission lines. "People want more power, but they don't want those lines"".
"Most of New York City's and Long Island's power at peak times must be generated in the city and on the Island, because it is physically impossible to transmit that much power into the area along the existing lines." ]
When Westinghouse took over the Hanford WA Nuclear facilities in the mid 70's, there were HUGE problems that are as yet UNSOLVED because of "secrecy". There are scores of gigantic thin shell steel tanks full of god knows what, that are known to be full of extremely radioactive fluids and metals, and nobody knows where the hell they are. They were buried back in the 40's, 50's and 60's, and are known to be leaking. And because of this the problem will never be solved untill we get a Chernobyl like event and by then of course, it will be too late. "Secrecy" in the name of some imaginary threat is more dangerous than the threat itself.
The Government refuses to harden systems such as the national power grids and Freeways, bridges and Refineries/Chemical plants etc because its CHEAPER. Better to let things be, keep the vulnerabilities secret and hope for nothing to happen then actually fix the problems. This is universal to almost everything sensitive and dangerous our government and other governments do. 9/11/01 proved this, because the threat of an airliner being used as a weapon was KNOWN, but was kept out of the public eye for reasons of "national security". Any fanatic with really deep concentration on acts of violence and destruction can think of ways to get around secrecy on the part of an enemy. Everything is a weapon, everything. And as long as there are "secrets", there will be vulneralbilities.
Stupid Humans.....
I have no factual data to back me up, but just guessing, it seems that a more distributed power generation system would be much cheaper (and more reliable). One problem appears to be that all the NIMBYs work to prevent power interconnection. For example, CT has blocked NY's use of an underwater cable for the last 1.5 yrs. Plainly, with a bit more local generation, everyone would have been better off.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
This should give you a different perspective on those images...
Maybe its just me, but those pictures are rather inaccurate.
The after picture doesn't have a single light on anywhere near Ottawa. However, there is a large urban area right across the river from Ottawa, cnosisting of Aylmer, Hull and Gatineau, all Quebec cities. We all had power here.
Would be interesting to know how the system and software works, but then again, that information could be dangerous in the wrong hands."
... This sounds a lot like the explanations of why Open Source software is so much more secure and reliable than proprietary software. ;-)
Well, maybe, but if it can be kept secret by the authorities, they'll just "explain" it with reassuring PR, while not bothering to do any real fixes to the problems.
A lot of us have had far too much experience with big organizations to believe that secrecy will lead to solving the problems. The right way to prevent such things is to make the entire system public information. Then independent engineers can study it, point out the weakness, and suggest solutions, without worrying about losing their jobs if they go public with the bug reports.
(Hmmm
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The wrong hands are the hands that believe in the theory of wrong hands. If distributed applications and development have taught anything, it's that progress is more sound when coming through open channels. I see nothing wrong with a more open approach to major (currently archaic) infrastructure. It may demand more participation from both the end and middle users, but is far more progressive. The question of whether the power grid is so ingrained as to be unchangable still remains. /me votes for distributed clean self sufficient energy networks (solar, wind, etc). Gets us out of this mega uber global corp dependancy we're currently in too, perhaps fostering collaboration at the same time.
I'm remnided of that Twilight Zone eipsode "The monsters are due on maple street" where a bizarre power failure drives the residents to kill each other.
If anyone is up to this task, it's this guy: Sean Gorman. Already discussed here.
Truth is, if information exists it will be discovered eventually. As others have pointed out, it is better to make a strong system than a secret one. And let's face it, it's pretty darn hard to hide power lines. As for the underground ones, they are marked so people who dig don't die.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I'm curious to know if the Blaster worm had anything to do this outage. So far I haven't seen any mention but it does seem to be a possibility.
Thankfully. Any decent electrical engineer knows something about hvac grids and tripping them. They are supposed to work exactly how they worked. I suspect that the grid frequency went down below a certain threshold and the grid tripped. This is a very essential feature because all the machinery on the grid and off the grid is designed for 60hz power freq. If it goes any lower, their efficiences wud go down hill and each piece will produce tremendous amounts of heat, which can possibly lead to mass fires/transformer explosions across the grid.
Why this happens is simple - the generators are asked to provide more power can they can ever generate - and they slow down(just like a motor loaded with a mechanical load)- also some generators that are supposed to come on-line but they didnt. Thankfully the grid equipment works by sensing - you know it - the grid, which is good because asshats cant interfere with it without getting soot on their hands. I am glad that cows like the ones that frequent slashdot dont write software for the grids. Its done by more deligient and more perfectionist electrical engineers (I am one - any doubts??).
As far as terrorists are concerned,I wouldnt worry too much about they getting this info (they have it already), because all it takes to know info about a grid is a decent electrical engineer, of which there is no dearth - american or non-amercan.
the next time the terrorists want to strike the US, they will go after the power generation stations. This blackout just pointed out a big weak point in the nation's infrastructure.
All they have to do is take out a 2 or 3 major power generating stations( eg. the Niagara hydroelectric) so that there is a major reversal of power and then blow up the some major transmission lines and stations.
Yes, planes might be harder to hijack but a tractor trailer filled with high powered explosives is more than enough for this kind of jobs.
Whatever city or cities are affected will be crippled for atleast 1-2 months.
Blackouts for 1-2 days in the summer is been bearable(it still has its costs though). Not in the fall or winter.
Bush is on fire and its not good for my lungs.
the second one sure looks much less light polluted.
Bill gates is dumping stock. Microsoft is going down the drain like a turd. The model of the software company with 100,000 programmers is very inefficient. Look at the best software houses of the world: Usually there is one master programmer, 3 secondary programmers, 20 helpers/porters and 40 testers. And you have great stuff like Baldurs gate, Soul reaver, Quake, etc. For the number of programmers Microsloth has it sould produce software like x1000 more than the open source. Most of the human resources are spent in the hierarchy, subdirectors of subdirectors evaluating the work of sub-debuggers of level 10, who give reports to supervisors, etc, etc. Microsoft is a tragedy waiting to happen.
I bet that: Bill will have the time to sell enough stock, 95% of microsoft emploees fired, microsoft software goes open source by the remaining 5%. All this in less than 3 years.
IMO Availablity of cell phone service is MANDATORY during a crisis like these. I hope the companies see this and design robust and scalable systems that wishstand a occurance like this. I wasnt in the area , So id like to know how the various carriers did duing the crisis.
It was taken from here and here. Both links are non-registration.
maybe if america spent less money interfering with and invading foreign countries and inventing new cruel and hideous ways to kill people, it might have some money left over to spend on its own infrastructure.
just a thought
Most universities have couses on power systems. As a mechanical engineering student, I took several courses on nuclear power plant design and operation. These classes included several tours to working power plants and training sites. This information is not really hard to get.
I can't speak on power plants in general, but I can comment a bit on nuclear plants. Most plants running in the US are quite old, thanks to public perception preventing any new plants from being built. So, most of them run pretty old systems. Most I've seen run on unix variants, mostly HP-UX and AIX. The software used is really just a backup, the plants can operate pretty much without the computer systems. The hardware is pretty much big old mainframes and mini-mainframe type stuff. IBM, Sun, HP, etc.
The primary function of the computer systems it to simplify some operations and to more easily report on conditions. For example you can view the power output of both reactors on one screen at the control center rather than having to walk over to the analog dials to check it out. They also monitor safety systems and can report on the state of different valves and things in the plant, rather than requiring you to go look at all the lights for individual valves.
Most plants are starting to modernize and new software is being developed to allow complete control of the plant. Currently most of the software used is for monitoring only, but it's starting to be deployed for control as well. So, rather than having to walk over and switch a lever to close a vavle, or turn a dial to up reactor power, you can just click. But this isn't really widespread yet.
There is some windows software out there for this stuff, but it's not widely used, at least in the US. Some of the newer advanced control systems are focusing on windows, so it looks like in the future there might be more windows in the plants.
A friend who's staying with us is a paramedic (also involved with coast guard), and immediately after power dropped, his nextel cell phone showed that the CG was using the gps in it to locate him.
He had lost his service, and ended up driving out to his station, but from what I can tell (and I could be wrong), they very quickly had it back up again. Now, whether it was just emergency personel like him or the general public, I don't know. I don't own a cellphone.
http://wsulug.org
Well, from my small observations of western Long Island during the blackout, I can say that AT&T service was horrible. It appeared that the network was up and running, but they couldn't handle the increased volume from panicky New Yorkers. You had to try a few times just to get anything but a fast busy... IF you had any signal at all.
As far as I know, Verizon's situation ranged from slightly better to just about the same. Probable due only to their denser coverage of the area.
By noon on friday all service seemed back to normal. I have to say that from the quality of their normal service, I was amazed to see them on the ball at all that night... or anywhere in the vicinity of said ball.
Which happens at most doppler sites with or without buildings coming down. This is the doppler at Brookhaven (Upton NY). If there's nothing else (emerging cloud tops, big storms) to look at, radar is usually aimed pretty low and this looks like ground clutter - moisture is a typical culprit. This one was about 6 AM local, the artifact is centered over the doppler location, not the WTC, you can see one like it on most unremarkable weather days. Here's a FAQ image from AccuWx -m
http://www.accuweather.com/iwxpage/paws/ex2.ht
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
must have been nice with so little pollution!
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Why is is that anything that happens in New York, Washington, or Los Angeles receives saturation news coverage, yet anything from anywhere else must meet a far higher threshold to rate the same treatment? With all of the local news stations and affiliates in the Northeast, this can't be attributed merely to media access. It's almost as if these places are being paid a banality tax.
The Beltway Sniper story was a fine example. Had the shootings occurred in a blighted urban neighborhood, instead of the upper-middle-class suburbs where the journalists actually live, it would never have received the same kind of coverage.
Or are people so ignorant of geography that stories of places like Albany or Hartford are lost on them?
This blackout was just a malfunction. Most of this problem was caused by overload because the grid couldn't handle the sudden loss of a plant. AC generators don't like sudden drastic changes in load so they tend to fail if that happends. So if that occures it takes time to fix the minor problem and restart. Time consuming but not a disater. But If someone drove a truck bomb upto just two key power plants and destroyed them then the blackouted area might be out for days if not weeks or even months as they would have to arrange for power to be supplied from other plants not connected to the affected grid.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
I can tell you all about the ne're-do-wells that put out our lights tonight. I came up against these characters -- the Niagara Mohawk Power Company -- some years back. You see, before I was a journalist, I worked for a living, as an investigator of corporate racketeers. In the 1980s, "NiMo" built a nuclear plant, Nine Mile Point, a brutally costly piece of hot junk for which NiMo and its partner companies charged billions to New York State's electricity ratepayers.
To pull off this grand theft by kilowatt, the NiMo-led consortium fabricated cost and schedule reports, then performed a Harry Potter job on the account books. In 1988, I showed a jury a memo from an executive from one partner, Long Island Lighting, giving a lesson to a NiMo honcho on how to lie to government regulators. The jury ordered LILCO to pay $4.3 billion and, ultimately, put them out of business.
And that's why, if you're in the Northeast, you're reading this by candlelight tonight. Here's what happened. After LILCO was hammered by the law, after government regulators slammed Niagara Mohawk and dozens of other book-cooking, document-doctoring utility companies all over America with fines and penalties totaling in the tens of billions of dollars, the industry leaders got together to swear never to break the regulations again. Their plan was not to follow the rules, but to ELIMINATE the rules. They called it "deregulation."
It was like a committee of bank robbers figuring out how to make safecracking legal.
But they dare not launch the scheme in the USA. Rather, in 1990, one devious little bunch of operators out of Texas, Houston Natural Gas, operating under the alias "Enron," talked an over-the-edge free-market fanatic, Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, into licensing the first completely deregulated power plant in the hemisphere.
And so began an economic disease called "regulatory reform" that spread faster than SARS. Notably, Enron rewarded Thatcher's Energy Minister, one Lord Wakeham, with a bushel of dollar bills for 'consulting' services and a seat on Enron's board of directors. The English experiment proved the viability of Enron's new industrial formula: that the enthusiasm of politicians for deregulation was in direct proportion to the payola provided by power companies.
The power elite first moved on England because they knew Americans wouldn't swallow the deregulation snake oil easily. The USA had gotten used to cheap power available at the flick of switch. This was the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt who, in 1933, caged the man he thought to be the last of the power pirates, Samuel Insull. Wall Street wheeler-dealer Insull created the Power Trust, and six decades before Ken Lay, faked account books and ripped off consumers. To frustrate Insull and his ilk, FDR gave us the Federal Power Commission and the Public Utilities Holding Company Act which told electricity companies where to stand and salute. Detailed regulations limited charges to real expenditures plus a government-set profit. The laws banned power "trading" and required companies to keep the lights on under threat of arrest -- no blackout blackmail to hike rates.
Of particular significance as I write here in the dark, regulators told utilities exactly how much they had to spend to insure the system stayed in repair and the lights stayed on. Bureaucrats crawled along the wire and, like me, crawled through the account books, to make sure the power execs spent customers' money on parts and labor. If they didn't, we'd whack'm over the head with our thick rule books. Did we get in the way of these businessmen's entrepreneurial spirit? Damn right we did.
Most important, FDR banned political contributions from utility companies -- no 'soft' money, no 'hard' money, no money PERIOD.
But then came George the First. In 1992, just prior to his departure from the White House, President Bush Senior gave the power industry one long deep-through-the-teeth kiss good-bye: federal deregulation of electricity. It was a lega
How DARE you soil the good name of the Simpsons!!
Read this today:
It is ridiculous to accept that a lightning strike could knock out the grid, or the transmission system is over stressed. There are many redundant fault, limit and Voltage-Surge Protection safeguards and related instrumentation and switchgear installed at the distribution centers and sub stations along the Power Grid
that would have tripped to prevent or otherwise divert such a major outage.
I believe that the outage was caused by the MSblaster, or its mutation, which was besieged upon the respective vulnerability in certain control and monitoring systems (SCADA and otherwise) running MS 2000 or XP, located
different points along the Grid. Some of these systems are accessible via the Internet, while others are accessible by POTS dialup, or private Frame relay and dedicated connectivity.
Being an old PLC automation and control hack let me say that there is a very good plausibility that the recent East Coast power outage was due to an attack by an MBlaster variant on the SCADA system at the power plant master terminal, or more likely at several of the remote terminal units "RTU". SCADA runs under Win2000 / XP and
the telemetry to the RTU is accessible via the Internet.
- From what I recall SCADA based monitoring and control systems were installed at many water / sewer processing, gas and oil processing, and hydro-electric plants.
I also believe that yesterdays flooding of a generator sub- facility in Philadelphia was also due to an MBlaster variant attack on the SCADA or similarly Win 2000 / XP based system.
To make things worst, the Web Interface is MS ActiveX. Now lets see, how can one craft an ActiveX vuln vector into the blaster?
Oh, and for the wardrivers, SCADA can be access via wireless connections on the road... puts a new perspective on sniffing around sewer plants.
It is also reasonable to assume that we could have a similar security threat regarding those system (SCADA and otherwise based on MS 2000 or XP) involved in the control, data acquisition, and maintenance of other critical infrastructure, such as inter/intra state GAS Distribution, Nuclear Plant Monitoring, Water and Sewer
Processing, and city Traffic Control. IMO
I think we will see a lot of finger pointing by government agencies, Utilities, and politicians for the Grid outage, until someone confess to the security dilemma and vulnerabilities in the systems which are involved in running this critical infrastructure.
Regardless of whether the Grid outage can be attributed to the blaster or its variant, this is not entirely a Microsoft problem, as it reeks of poor System Security Engineering practiced by the Utility Companies, and associated equipment and technology suppliers.
Nonetheless, the incident will cause lots of money to be earmarked by the US and Canadian Governments, to be spent in an attempt to solve the problem, or more specfically calm the public.
This incident should be fully investigated, and regulations passed to ensure that the Utility companies and their suppliers develop and implement proper safeguards that will help prevent or at least significantly mitigate the
effects of such a catastrophe.
Conversely, I do not want to see our Government directly involved in yet another "business", which has such a controlling impact over our individual lives.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Actually, this is very unlikely. Systems like the American power grid are highly resilient.
Blow up a transformer? So what, there goes a neighborhood.
Blow up a substation? Big deal, so a town or small city is messed up for a little while.
Blow up a power plant? A shame, but other production facilities on the grid can pick up the slack for a while.
Catastrophic power failures are rare, because minor failures are common, expected, planned for, and almost always isolated to a small area. By definition, terrorist groups do not have the resources to do any more than minor damage. In attacking the airline system, "minor" damage can be effective, as September 11 showed, but the power system takes more damage from a little summer thunderstorm than al-Qaeda could ever do -- and for the most part life goes on unaffected.
This is why I find all the bleating on by the newscasters & politicians that "the power outage was not the result of terrorism." Well of course it wasn't, this isn't the sort of attack that a small malicious party can pull off. It just isn't. Power stations go out all the time, but normally nobody ever notices. Indeed, it is very, very hard to deliberately bring down a power system: NATO spent a month bombing the power grid & computer networks in Yugoslavia, but they never managed to do much more than bring a city like Belgrade down for a few hours before power was restored. If NATO couldn't do it, then I doubt terrorists could either.
If you want to bring down a whole grid, the best way to do it is by plain dumb luck (or an overwhelming lack of luck, depending on your point of view :-). It was a random fluke that caused yesterday's outage, just as it was random flukes that brought down the grid in the last two major outages, in 1977 & 1965. On the bright side, that suggests that the mean time between power grid failures may have doubled, and the next event like this may happen in 50 years... :-). (Incidently, the Presidential Report on the 1965 outage makes for fascinating -- and newly relevant -- reading material).
Resist the culture of fear! Most of the fears that the government and media have been pushing on us for the past couple of years are way overblown. The news this week wasn't that the power system is unstable, or that terrorists could have done this. No! The news is that the system is remarkably robust, and that our system is so good that we can go for decades at a time without glitches like this. That's a very good record, when you put things in perspective.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Now, if we can just shut off the rest of the outside lights... I'll bet some children saw stars for the first time in their entire lives.
On that basis, anyone with rudimentary knowledge of network theory and electricity knows everything necessary to cause havoc with the power grid in the US.
Since the Department of Homeland Insecurity hasn't rounded up any chainsaw-wielding biker maths professors, I think it can be taken for granted that they don't regard such an attack as very likely, even though it would be very simple.
In terms of complexity, which is easier, cheaper and quicker? To build a biological weapon that actually works, or to get some geek on a dirtbike to cut down critical and hard-to-reach pylons around the US?
Sure, the former has the "James Bond" touch, but the latter could be done over a few weeks, cost maybe five or six thousand dollars tops, and given the sheer size of the US and the sheer amount of wilderness, would be considerably harder to stop.
On this basis, I don't see any justification for the secrecy behind the recent PhD thesis, or the weaknesses that caused this recent blackout. The additional risk posed is negligable, in comparison to the risk that already exists!
I don't advocate terrorism, and regard the use of any violence as a means of getting results a sign of inferior intellect. Violence is, in my opinion, not only the last refuge of the incompetent, but the first, and only refuge they know.
If I'm advocating anything here, it's a restructuring of the power grid so that it is a self-adapting network, capable of handling damage to a segment, without shutting everything down.
If your christmas tree lights fail, do you:
Chances are, you'll pick the first of those options. If you picked the second, you're presumably one of those in charge of the grid that failed.
The ideal system is one that can correctly load-balance between stations, cap the power demanded from any given station, and cap the power any given node in the grid can demand.
If the power needs to flow in reverse, side to side, or through purple-spotted jello, it shouldn't matter, so long as the grid functions. We already have networking protocols (ECN, HQF, RSVP, SFQ, plus the Ad-Hoc routing protocols) which are specifically designed to carry this type of information over a loosely-structured network in which links (ie: power lines) may fail at random.
We already have all the technology we need. We already know how to make this kind of system 100% robust against failures - accidental or deliberate. None of this is "arcane", "hyper-new" or "cost-prohibitive". We're talking freely available code, very cheap embedded cards, and high voltage/high current potentiometers to handle the flow-control.
This is CHEAP STUFF that could have been installed any time in the last 5 years. Most of it could have been installed in the last 30 years, though you'd have lost some of the sophistication.
But 5 years is still an appreciable length of time. The power grid that failed was known to have problems. The critical areas could - and should - have been upgraded to support fault tolerance of some kind. The method outlined above (where each transformer and each branch in the network is considered a router in a totally mobile network, and where flow control is handled dynamically by the routers, based on QoS rules, router announcements and router protocol rules) is one kind of fault tolerance. It was originally planned by DARPA to survive a nuclear strike, if properly implemented. Here is a real opportunity to demonstrate that robustness. Other
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Blackouts of this magnitude hit New England every 15 years or so. Load balancing in the power system is rather complicated over the distances in the USA. Better understanding of how the power system works would do wonders for people understanding how the Enrons are screwing the public. Deregulation of the power industry will make major failures like this happen more often. Companies like Enron are more of a threat to the powersystem than any herd of Al Qedas: the enrons are removing the ability of the system to recover from and defend against kamakaze squirrels, which are still more of a threat than hostile humans.
I've always been under the impression that 'M$' is some sort of global string variable in Visual Basic that nobody can figure out how to use. I doubt that power plants have much use for VB, though.
I find it interesting that in those pictures, most of the US cities affected are dim, but the Canadian cities are completely gone.
Canada may be a big producer of electricity, but Ontario (which has about 1/3 the population and the largest industrial base) is still a net importer. The lack of supply and worries about the infrastructure have been a massive political issue for the last couple of years, delaying the provincial election (governments get to choose the timing of elections under the Canadian system - they simply has to be at least once every five years) because of the public's worries about the summer power demand spike.
After an unusually cool summer (relative to recent years) Thursday was the first "hot" day in much of Ontario and thus the first real test of the provinical government's claims that their critics were just fear-mongering. It may turn out to be a coincidence, but no matter where the initial spark was, the fact that the whole grid collapsed is not likely to be forgiven.
(by the way, it was a really nice night - beautiful sunset)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cybe rwar/vulnerable/grid.html
Yes, I live In columbus as well, close to OSU. There was no interuption of power at my residence.
Good point! it would be neat to know how the grid works and to understand the various software and its interactions.
Keeping information like "How the power grid works" and "What vulnerabilities the power grid has" secret is short term thinking at best. All it means is that Joe average can't bring the grid down. Anyone who learns the secrets of the grid (man this is sounding like a B movie) can likely exploit its vulnerabilities. (The power company people I know seem to think it would be trivial for motivated people to pull off this sort of crime). This would be a bad thing (for those of you who have too much time on your hands and no moral conscience).
Better to "OPEN SOURCE" (sorry) the vulnerabilities so they can be addressed. Hey if Canada is wired backwards (I'm Canadian) then that should be fixed. If there are no "Giant circuit breakers at the border (state or national) then maybe there should be. Better for One state to completely black out while the others experience a surge or brownout or whatever than for everything to go down.
It's like our lives. If we hide our character from ourselves or others, our opportunity to have that character refined or improved (or challenged) is very minimal. But if we live our lives openly and honestly, then there is the chance to have good challenges, and improvements.
In the same way we reveal ourselves to others gradually, starting with those who are trusted. It would make sense in this case to reveal this in a graduated way, where initially it would move beyond the power companies (motivation money) to those responsible for maintaining public services / order (motivation serve the public) to those who are not responsible for power, but might have valuable insight (motivation accountability)
FWIW there is my $0.02 ($0.03 CDN)
Greg
http://www.GreenTreeSoftware.ca
"Sometimes you've got to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight" Bruce C0ckburn
It's also manditory that dumbasses don't tie all the circuits up by making useless calls to each other. All "Hello. Yeah, I just called to say that I'm on the bus" types calls should be canceled, and if people do have to call all their friends to ask them if they have power, keep the calls short.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Now that it's a "crisis", Dubya's going to announce another boondoggle program to "fix" things up. Things being the bank accounts of his energy industry cronies.
Can you see me now? Good!
I would love to know more about how the power transmission system works. I suppose I could just take some Power Systems EE courses or buy a book on the subject, but viewing a map or diagrams of transmission systems would also be of great interest. I did some basic googling trying to find transmission line maps for the great lakes area affected by the blackout, and all I could find was a 40x50 inch map offered for sale for $50 US on a .gov website.
I'm curious about this because across the street from me the power stayed on for an hour longer than mine did, and a few blocks away power wasn't lost. I live about 20 miles from Niagara Falls, 20 miles from a coal-fired station and about 2 miles from a gas-fired station. They say that only the Niagara plant stayed up during the whole ordeal.
Ahh, curiosity.
On the "after" pic is a bright line from Detroit to Montreal. Satelite? ISS?
Cheers
KdenLive/PIAVE - non-linear video editing
the stupidity of some people here is staggering, neither open source or having the code audited will stop bugs/exploits
see FSF.org for details, they was r00ted for nearly 6months !!
what they lack in intelligence they make up for with guns and weapons
this blackout. I live here in Pittsburgh, abd the main reason that we were 'saved' from being knocked out is that our grid section was designed to support large iron and steel mills (which of course are no longer in existance). This gives us one hell of a buffer against surges such as the one that caused the cascading balckouts on Thursday. Hopefully America (and Canada) will learn from their mistakes this time and this will hopefully never occue again. On a simialr note, I just hate to even think of all the high uptime counts lost on effected *nix boxes in the blacked out areas. :)
-Cnik
less light polution is good
The real problem was how the cutouts work. Normally, problems like lightning strikes and tree limbs falling on power lines happen all the time and the cutouts work. But the cutouts only work for a certain amount of load. If we have the sucessive failure of two or more nodes, then the amount of overload becomes too much for the successive cutout to be able to contain. and takes out the entire grid.
It would be a lot more meaninful if BOTH the images were placed in a single window, to better compare the differences.
"sites full of crazies"
Please, specify which ones are the crazies.
8-/
Damn those pesky terrorists
is the one in the Rotten Library entry for North Korea.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Sure was dangerous in the RIGHT hands.
Most Detailed Image Of Earth Yet (20 February):
So that's why Africa^H^H^H^H^HAmerica is called the dark continent...
Sure, really big population centers lost power, but it wasn't the entire northeast. New Jersey and Boston's still there. The news people have been sexing this up, methinks. What's that white streak on the "after" shot? A big meteorite trail?
I've got a composite of the difference that the blackout made areas that were darker during the blackout are in red. Areas that were bright at both times are white.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
There are places you can download all sorts of information from, some for free and some for pay, information which you can then put into a GIS (Geographical Information System), and make very detailed maps and plans. Satellite and aerial photography to GPS surveys of water, power, and other infrastructure, as well as parcel maps and TIGER census data. And more data are being added every day. The amout of data available is truly staggering, and the quality is constantly improving.
I know, I've put together some very detailed and targeted GIS projects for private companies and local governments. Some were accurate to a foot or less, and worked with modern GPS. And we've come a long way just in the last few years.
-cp-
It's a bit more complicated than the Cape is typically environmentalists and they say no to windmills.
Cape residents are often environmentalists because of past history with "simple" solutions - like practicing fuel dump belly landings at the Air Force base (oh, the aircraft fuel just 'goes away'), unexploded ordnance in backyards located on the downsized mil res, and dumping decades of high volume darkroom chemicals into the sole fresh water source on the cape - result in billions of dollars in later solutions, cancer rates (besides melanoma) that defy explanation... the list goes on.
And it's also likely because no one can ensure that the power will improve things nor that it will necesssarily save ratepayers any money - but the developers stand to make a ton of money supplying what is historically a public utility.
It's not much different than most people - who don't want it in their view either. I bet you don't, as well.
If you've spent any time on the cape - six miles is not exactly very far away over open water - there are scenarios that are getting greater support than the publicized ones. And in reality, the farm will be less than 5 miles from shore, and visible for 20 miles. The developers had to re-do their visual mockups after a few others sharpened their pencils and showed how things would truly look.
I consider myself an environmentalist, not for sentimental reasons, but because as a biologist, you see time and time again just how short-sighted most quick fixes are. Go research the history of the salt marshes in New England to see just how destructive well-meaning solutions can be. Hell, I used to sled down sand dunes when I was a kid. I learned first hand what happens when you accelerate dune erosion.
The cape is still as well-preserved as it is today largely because a great deal of it was protected from commercial development in the creation of the national seashore. Imagine the lower cape, unprotected, looking pretty much like the Rt 28 South Yarmouth stretch. Now do that same sort of thing to the water - where there is no established regulation for this thing, and see what happens next. This is not a solution for cape power (there is no shortage on the cape) it's an investment opportunity, the generated power will mostly flow off-cape most of the time, and the typical ratepayer will see less than a dollar's reduction in their monthly bill, while the developers pay no leases and hang 50K gallons of hazardous waste 400 ft in the air, just waiting for a toppling force (and it takes less than you think to dump one of these mills - less than a hurricane).
It's not knee-jerk stuff - it's learning.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Lots of people have chimed in talking about how these pictures of the blackout could give away some information "vital" to national security.
Nobody seems to have noticed that the satellite that took the pictures is a military weather satellite whose orbital information hasn't been available to the general public since 9/11/01.
It's 11 pm in the "after" image, if we take 4pm eastern time as a reference; but only 8pm in the "before"; so there is some bias toward less light in the after picture just because it's later at night.
In Siberia, apparently there were whole underground nuclear cities. One of them blew (sabotage, it is believed, but I doubt anyone will ever know.)
That's not Chernobyl -- that's a whole different thing.
At least, that's what ex Soviets in the Baltic say. Whether it's true or not, I don't know. But I suspect it is possible.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Interesting article about what set the scene for this historic blackout:
Power Outage Traced To Dim Bulb In White House: The Tale Of The Brits Who Swiped 800 Jobs From New York, Carted Off $90 Million, Then Tonight, Turned Off Our Lights
Whoa!!! Power goes out and lights go out!! FREAKY DEAKY!
- Voxel
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
"Would be interesting to know how the system and software works, but then again, that information could be dangerous in the wrong hands."
I submit the black out as evidence that the information is not in the right hands.
give me a break. Power over IP was an april fools joke. The power systems are very complex systems that are remarkably fault tolerant. Trees always fall down on powerlines with no aid from "biker maths professors" and 99% of the time there is little disruption outside the immediate area. ITs only when certain failure modes are not accounted for that outages like this can occur.
High voltage high current potentiometers? Um, yeah, go back to engineering school. Considering that high voltage powerlines carry hundreds of millions of watts, are you planning on dissipating all that energy through a potentiometer?
Parallel versus series? give me a break. These are incredibly complex loops with thousands of sources and millions of nodes and sinks. You're not going to be able to model the North American powergrid with high-school physics.
Of course AC still has direction . Power and energy still have a direction even if the current reverses direction. If the sources and loads suddently change, then the flow of power can reverse, regardless of whether its AC or DC.
Stick diodes in the middle of the grid to keep power moving in one direction? That is so stupid it doesn't deserve an answer.
ARe you someone who took a 2 week MSCE training course and now calls yourself an engineer? Unlike computers, electical systems are dealing with vast amounts of power and energy that must be generated and consumed at the same time. Routers and other methods used in networking have no use in power distribution. Could the systems have been designed better to take into account this particular failure mode? Sure. Are the systems so "incredibly stupid" that any idiot with a high school education could do better? hell no.
Why does everyone just swallow everything about this whole "our security needs to be protected, so we won't tell you how we fucked it up!" It sure hasn't worked for microsoft, and I don't think it's worked for anyone as good as the BSD policy.
If we had more knowlege of how the plants worked, we wouldn't have had a bunch of idiots (read f-- idiots) mess it up like this.
And another thing! why does everyone want to know "who's fault was this", rather than, "who the f- was clean on this whole thing?"
As with any service run today, nobody prepares for demand -- enough. For example, your dialup ISP probably has one line for every 20 people. Power companies have one watt for every 4 people, etc. That's great, they can save output, and lower costs, but they are BIG TIME RESPONSIBLE, when they're need-estimates, and safty measures to meet the demand gets totally messed up.
Perhaps we couldn't take a so mean, aggressive approach before, but it's totally nessesary now, and I think this whole big lack of responsibilty should definatly be a wake-up call. Get onto the power companies, and get onto the green jerks if you're not helping things, get out of the way, or get DuNKED ON!
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
As for info on the power grid getting into "the wrong hands", this isn't some sort of national secret. It's not classified information. Some of the security methods used to protect individual plants or other parts of the power grid are not made public, but anyone who watches The Discovery Channel on a fairly regular basis probably has as good an idea of how the power grid works as would be needed to bring part of it down. The method of the failure this time (3 high power transmission lines failing simultaneously, causing an overload) seems remarkably similar to what happened in 1965. Which in itself is pretty ridiculous - this wasn't supposed to happen again. Any terrorist could plant a few bombs at the base of some of these high tension wire towers and bring the system down if this is all it takes - this is not something that would require declassifying information to figure out.
And I don't agree with those who say this is not a dangerous thing. I was one of the millions of New Yorkers who had to walk home over one of our river crossings on Thursday. Imagine a coordinated attack involving first taking out the power to the northeast, followed by any one of the following:
Those are just a few examples - I'm sure there are many more that terrorists have already thought of. It is very dangerous for power to be completely out in any major city, let alone the northeast - nobody is able to get any news or announcements (land and cel phones were down on Thursday, and even the news outlets not knocked off the air were relying on those who could get through on phones for information), emergency calls cannot be made, emergency vehicles cannot get through streets choked by pedestrians, police and fire departments cannot communicate with their bases, hospitals have to rely on minimal power from backup generators, etc.
Until we heard definitively that this was not a terrorist act on Thursday, everyone in this city was very nervous - I was surely not the only one who thought it could be a setup for something larger. After all, we've been through this before - both large-scale power outages and large-scale terror attacks. Once we were told that it definitely was not terrorism, that's when the partying started - but until that point, there was what I consider to be a perfectly justified fear in the voice of pretty much everyone I talked to.
For all the non-engineers, this is called "power factor correction". In AC power systems, the voltage and current waveforms are sinusoids (well, with harmonics and crap, but we'll ignore them). The system operates more efficiently when the voltage and current waveforms are in phase. If we call the phase angle between the voltage and current (a.k.a. the power factor angle) "theta", then the power factor is arccos(theta).
Someone correct me if I've got it backwards, but I believe inductive loads cause current to lag voltage, and capacitive loads cause current to lead voltage. Mathematically we treat these as imaginary (sqrt(-1)) impedences. If you can get the inductive and capacitive parts to cancel out (kinda like adding complex conjugates) you're left with only real impedences (i.e. resistive-only loads), which are much nicer.
sigs are for suckers
I live in columbus where we were *not* affected by the outage.
I live in Columbus as well, and can tell you that some people in the city and it's outlying areas *were* affected. We just didn't get hit nearly as bad as elsewhere.
Actually, we already had our major black-out last month due to storms. Maybe we were better prepared.
I think I see Barbra Streisand's house in the before picture, I hope she doesn't sue!
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
I wasn't going to get into this bit, but so many recently have gone on and on about power deregulation. Last year, power deregulation was blamed for CA's issues; now it's deregulation that has caused this. This was a simple case of a failure of the automatic systems followed by a failure of the human systems.
Let's start with CA. Deregulation, I think not! A system that puts a price ceiling in place is not deregulation. CA's issue was simply a combination of:
- A recent reluctance to add any "real" generating power. I'm not talking a co-gen here, a co-gen there. I'm talking power plants that generate around 1000Mw. In the past years, CA's added somewhere near 300Mw total.
- An increase in load.
- And the number one reason, a price ceiling that prevented the delivery companies from buying power at market rate.
Now we hear a group of people crying deregulation in this particular instance. What part of deregulation caused this? Nothing. The simple answer is that there was a failure. The automatic systems didn't handle it. The humans could have; they didn't. The same thing happened in 1965. And with similar results. The North East went dark. So where did the power stay on? Pennsylvania
Why did it stay on here? Well, as history tells us, the person in charge of one of PA's power companies saw the load increase significantly and got on the phone with the neighboring manager. The phone call went something like this:
"We have a problem, you must shed NY now!"
"I don't know if I want to do that."
"You will shed NY by the count of 10 or I will shed you and you will go down with them! 1 2 3 4 5 [load drops] thank you."
This is how the power system is supposed to work. When load goes to high, you get shed it and there is a small blackout. Based on what I'm hearing there was a 1000Mw differential in the direction power was flowing around the great lakes. At the moment that happened, someone should have jumped to look for places to isolate. Apparently the PA connects did. We stayed up once again.
I just talked about PA's proper implementation of the procedures and the benefits we've obtained from them. I know that's not necessary due to deregulation, but I'd also like to point out that we do have a true model deregulation. We deregulated power a few years back. I chose my power generation company a few weeks back. I had the choice of a few different providers (some offer green-only, some produce the power cheaper). All in all, we have affordable, reliable power.
Basically we didn't mess with the system, we let the market handle it when it came to price and we followed the procedures put in place when it came to disasters.
Someone crossed the streams.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
... there are textbooks and IEEE tutorials. It's too complicated to explain in a simple message.
The devices that did the shutdown were probably the protective relays that are individual devices. During the Y2K effort I saw a log file from one of them at a presentation and it made me think of a single board processor running MS-DOS, but it might have been only a logging processor and not the hardware that does the work.
The control centers run variants of Unix, with some running NT. The control centers monitor the field devices, allow some of them to be controlled, and run some very sophisticated prediction algorithms to see what alarms would result from hundreds of contingencies. The algorithms essentially simulate the failures and figure out what else would fail as the power redistributes itself to compensate.
The investigation will need to figure out why those predictions didn't alert operators to change the configuration of the grid to stop the cascade that happened.
this IS a wakeup call to modernize... this blackout just told terrorists how suseptable we are... take out 4 power plants and all four corners of the us could be knocked out! ;[
... whelp, thank god for gba sp ;D
on a similar note...having no power totally sucks... I woke up at 4:30pm to see my computer off... *shivvers run down back*
_________ Help me get a PSP!
Lets hear it for censorship. Don't you feel so much safer because there is forbidden knowledge?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Speak for your own radio. I was tired of listening to the radio in my truck, but searched for a portable radio for which I had proper batteries in vain. I certainly wasn't going to join the mobs rushing to buy batteries at the Kwik E Mart. After a bit of thinking, I went rummaging through my kid's room and found...his crystal radio kit. I threw the antenna wire over a small tree in the yard, attached the ground to a copper ground rod (installed by Ma Bell). I could then listen to 4 stations (2 of which had music) while resting in my hammock reading a novel.
On later reflection, I had the necessary diode in a spare parts drawer and could have built a much better one if I felt inclined.
Get off my lawn.
The niagara hydro station was about the only one that DIDNT go down, it was generating power through the whole event which is why most of Buffalo didn't lose power.
This space available.
It wasn't fully dark in Columbus OH yet this time of year at 9:14 PM EDT in Columbus OH
On the right of the Montreal arrow !
No, they were not affected by this. The only area affected by this in AEP (which serves Columbus) territory was Mt. Vernon in Knox county, about 40 miles NE of Columbus. There may have been outages at the time, but they were not a result of the blackout.
Now, if your service was from First Energy (whose territory begins just a bit north of Columbus, then your lights were probably out.
Widespread outages (such as caused by last month's storms) are not usually considered "blackouts", although I'm sure the difference is lost on those affected. The storms certainly are not a help in preparing for this kind of thing.
On a side note...
I am a Electrical Engineer/Programmer-Analyst with over twenty years experience and I am very surprised and puzzled by this blackout.
When the 1965 blackout occured, the utilities got together and formed regional reliability councils to prevent a recurrance. Simply stated, the idea was separate the network (the electric power network) from the area having problems, once the problems got bad enough. It worked in 1977 when NYC went black, but the rest of the northeast did not.
However, this blackout was worse than the 1965 one! There are "rules of the road" on how to operate the electric power system and I'm going to be extremely interested in what caused this to happen.
Milalwi
US nuke plants are just starting to use "digital" control, although they have used computers for monitoring for years. Pretty hard to cause many problems there.
In Canada we've designed our plants to used centralized control computers, with separate minicomputers for ShutDown systems.
Anyone care to hack a non-networked Varian '73 computer? How about a Data-General mini-computer with all software in PROM?
You could kill every windows computer in the plant and cause little more than an inconvenience.
I highly expect the US plants are similarly well secured.
And I haven't gotten into my thoughts on the actual weak points of the system. At best, I think you could disrupt service significantly, but it would be very difficult to cause real damage.
Considering the PR damage it would cause, I'd say that nuke plants take lots of precautions in physical and electronic security. Terrorists go for the most bang for the buck. Nuke plants aren't it.
"Would be interesting to know how the system and software works, but then again, that information could be dangerous in the wrong hands."
It seems to me, given current events, that the system and its software are deadly dangerous, even in "the right hands".
Thank you for reassuring everybody!
Now I know why Quebec stayed out of the Power Grid.
Sticky tape, baling wire and Microsoft software!!!
By the way, I am in Montreal and the power here barely flickered.
After 1977, ConEd NYC was supposed to have made sure that a loss of power coming it would not bring the entire city down, because of local generation plants in NYC...
Whatever happened to that?
Weren't the loss of power enough to do emergency startup at the local power plants?
but then again, that information could be dangerous in the wrong hands
Yeah, because we all know that security through obscurity is _really_ reliable.
-sig- It's not stupid, it's advanced -sig-
Once the power and water is knocked out, the black helicopters arrive and take us all to the alien mothership hovering on the dark side of the moon.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I HAVE THE WRONG HANDS!!!
I live in Columbus, Ohio. The before picture shows Columbus, Ohio lit, and the after picture shows it dark. Columbus did not have a black out. Doctored photo? Not sure, but still wonder why it shows Columbus blacked out.
"Artificial Intelligence usually beats real stupidity."
Columbus being showed as 'dark' when we did not have a black out, even if a legit anomale, just means the picture is worthless then, in my opinion.
OhioJoe
"Artificial Intelligence usually beats real stupidity."
Or is Pyongyang laughing themselves silly about the blackouts right now?
The maps look just like N. Korea does every night.
OUCH.
"Pull US troops out of the Holy Land of Mecca!" How many months do you think it would be before popular demand to remove troops from Mecca would be deafening?
How many months do you think it would be before popular demand changed the government in charge of the Holy City of Mecca? How many months of coordinated attacks would it take before there would be a new foreign policy with the Holy City of Mecca or there would be a smoking crater there replacing the Holy City of Mecca.
Terrorists don't work alone. Period. Especially not in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, or Pakistan.
I do believe that we would start putting "the pressure" on them just as fast as they would on us. Perhaps in a more organized, more overt way. Blowing up civilians is hardly a good strategy for attacking a government with a poorly concieved "destruction of your civilization" strategy. Killing innocents just precipitates full scale war. If you didn't notice, we went through the 5th largest army in the world like a hot knife through butter. No one in the Middle East had as many arms as Saddam. To them and their idiotic ideals of destroying us, I say good luck. You're going to need it.
Trust me, if push comes to shove, we would execute the captured terrorists and bury them upside down with bibles and female clothing covered in pig blood if the shit gets too hectic. If they think that ANY GROUP (much less the Israelis or the Americans) are pussies that won't get extreme enough to defend ourselves from sociopaths? Then well, they have a lot to learn from the history of all humanity throughout all time. People, or civilizations just don't up and cry and say, "We're sorry. We'll be creating that Islamic utopia for you right now, sir."
This terrorism shit does not work. It doesn't bring about anything. It just kills. Their plan is good for a few whack jobs. But ultimately, it accomplishes nothing related to their goal.
I think many of you overestimate your enemies and underestimate your own resolve to survive them.
No, it just shows you know nothing about considering all factors when interpreting valid data.
In my opinon.
The province took the opportunity to modernize its power system, so was unaffected this time. The power system is also publicly run, as it is in Ontario, but the Quebec government has been fairly socialist, compared to the more right-wing small-government party running Ontario, so was more willing to spend the necessary money to upgrade.
In some ways, Ottawa got off lighter than other cities because we had more options than people in Toronto and in the US. We could go over to Quebec, though the traffic was crazy between 4 and 8pm.
Approx 3/4 (785 000) of the National Capital Region is in Ottawa Ontario (Ottawa, Nepean, Gloucester et al.) and approximately 1/4 (250 000) is in Gatineau, Quebec. Gatineau (the merged Gatineau [Aylmer, Hull, Masson, Angers, Buckingham & old Gatineau] experienced no change to its power situation, save for Ontarians (myself included) coming over in search of gas, food and well, it seemed like a good time to do laundry and go for a swim at Meech Lake.
It 1/4 of the metro area had electricity, you would think that the satellite image would show some light. What happened to the 250 000 people in Gatineau using electricity? I can see St. John NB, Moncton NB, Augusta ME and Bangor ME quite clearly on the map and all of those 3 cities are much smaller than Gatineau.
I make a reasonable middle-class wage by going to work and not spamming blogs with scams.
We drove to Buckingham, QC (and if you're from the region, it's about 30 minutes from the Byward Market area) to get some Tim Hortons coffee because the entirety of Gatineau was swamped. Oddly enough one of my first priorities was coffee, even on a hot night.
Once our trip was done (four hours, the Jacques Cartier bridge was swamped taking us twenty-five minutes to get across) we drove back into the city. Now, the market was somewhat lit by then, but we got in one fender benders, and avoid six other very near collisions. People on the roads seemed panicky. But by far the creepiest thing was getting on the Queensway near King Edward. It was practically pitch-black, and the Queensway was very dark. The whole ride home was some sort of post-apocolyptic journey into the unknown.
So once back in the city we delivered doughtnuts to those who requested and rolled one for the occasion. Nothing like sitting on your porch by the light of the moon on the eve of a crisis smoking one for the hell of it.
Anyway, I'm just glad the air-conditioning is back on. :)
Anyone else have my kind of fun during the blackout?
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
Might makes right fucko, I bet whatever country you call home was formed by military action.
Blar.
After some searching I found the original highres DMSP satellite images plus additional footage on GlobalSecurity.org.
Greetx, Erik
The URLs for the before and after blackout pictures were accessed from the following page: www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories/s2015.htm There are a few more pictures there and some explanatory text. I'm a little disappointed with the resolution of these "night" pictures. If you've flown over the region (admittedly at only 35,000 feet / 7 miles) you know how much interesting detail that can be seen on a clear night.
[Insert pretentious and semi-clever sig here: ______ ]
The power outage happened at 4 p.m., 3 or 4 hours before sunset. So the first pic, at least, can't be what it seems to be at first glance, a picture of visible light. Street and other outdoor lights would not be on at that time.
So, will somebody please tell what this is really a picture of?
nt
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
You might as well have replied, "You're wrong, because purple kangaroos never use Colgate toothpaste." Your reply did not address how the photo is of use when non-factual representation, intentional or not, is part of the data.
"Artificial Intelligence usually beats real stupidity."