Slashdot Mirror
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."
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".
If a map with so little detail can be used to bring down the power grid, we've got bigger problems. There isn't even a scale on that map.
Come on. 'Sensitive' information can be found in any street map you buy from the corner store. Did you know, for example, that JFK airport is in New York City? Keeping power plants secure, and airports for that matter, doesn't rely on keeping them hidden. It means using more than a chain link fence and a rent-a-cop to keep people out. If you think you'll be able to keep terrorist from finding power plants you're crazy. You can see them from the highway!
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?
or large parts of Africa, or the interior of South America, or even parts of USA (whatever the hell state is next to California).
Oh wait, I get it. North Korea is communist, so they don't have power.
I don't think the 'after' picture is accurate at all. I live in columbus where we were *not* affected by the outage. however, the after picture clearly shows that columbus was 'dark'. We were just fine. Most of our power comes from the Ohio River IIRC. Sure, the picture is 'neat' to see parts of NY state and other areas under darkness via satellite, but I am treating it more as an 'artist's rendering', not a legitimate photo. I would expect more from NOAA.
Anyone else notice the same thing?
-John
"The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and hoping for different results"
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.....
The image states that it's "~7 hours after blackout" which puts it right around 11pm EDT or thereabouts. Even if Columbus wasn't DARK I'm sure it was darkER.
El riesgo vive siempre!
North Korea is dark because they have major power problems, due mostly to their horrifically inefficient government.
Nevada is dark because most of it is unpopulated. There's a big difference there.
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.
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
IN SOVIET RUSSIA they used to "hide" whole cites such as the "Atomic City" full of nuclear bomb workers; they weren't on any maps. Of course, the CIA knew exactly where they were -- by satellites if not otherwise. So who were they keeping it secret from? Their own citizens.
The power grid is composed of enormous power stations, with thousands of workers, the power lines are either huge pylons you can see for miles, or if underground, emblazoned with warning signs. If they tried to hide these, the first thing you'd notice would be a large increase in outages due to lines being cut by backhoes, etc.
As for whether "terrorists" would target the power grid, I don't see it. Not much bang for the buck. How many died in this, the biggest outage in the US for decades? A half-dozen. It'll be forgotten in a few weeks. Blowing stuff up and killing lots of people is much simpler and does a much better job of terrorising the population. Cutting the power off for a few hours just pisses them off. (With apologies to anyone on a heart-lung machine.)
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
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.
>>As for whether "terrorists" would target the power grid, I don't see it. Not much bang for the buck. How many died in this, the biggest outage in the US for decades? A half-dozen. It'll be forgotten in a few weeks. Blowing stuff up and killing lots of people is much simpler and does a much better job of terrorising the population. Cutting the power off for a few hours just pisses them off. (With apologies to anyone on a heart-lung machine.)
OTOH, cutting off power immediately before an "actual" attack could cripple the response.
Actually, the opposite. I bet the military went on high alert as soon as the power went off. Of course, civil disaster response would be hampered. But it would add a layer of complexity -- the timing has to be perfect, and it's more people in the loop, and more likelihood of leaks.
The US had weapons specifially designed to attack the Iraqi power grid, but I don't think the US has to worry about a conventional military attack on its mainland.
" the after picture clearly shows that columbus was 'dark'."
If you look at both pictures, you'll see that Columbus is closer to the edge of the picture in the "dark" photo than in the "light." Which means that during the "dark" picture, the satellite saw Columbus almost eddge-on, reducing the amount of light the camera could see coming from Columbus as well as putting more atmosphere between the two. Columbus got "darker" because of the same reasons the sun gets "darker" near sunset.
Oh it can be done but it would be anoying and that would be a desireable goal. Also if the terrorists were very well organized they could take out backup links and plung an area into total power loss for quite some time. We don't have enough powerplants in the country or enough main distrubution lines to easily switch loads. This is going to happen again and again untill the American people quit being such energy users or quit being having the "not in my backyard" attitude about powerplants and the like.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
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
Typicaly they use home brewed explosives to try to level a building and fail miserably,
Terrorists typicaly speaking are stupid people fueled by cause and emotion not rational.
Right.... Tell that to the Israeli's who are on board buses or in markets that are blown up on a monthly if not weekly basis, or the people who had friends and family in either the Murry Federal building or the world trade center. Tell it to the Australians who had family in the Bali night club. As to the intelligence of the terrorists, again I think you vastly underestimate them, the footsoldiers in their war of terror may be ignorant, but the leaders and planners are anything but. The first attack on the trade centers was planned by a guy with a degree in engineering, and it might have worked had they not planted the bomb in the wrong spot (they planted it inside the structure of the building not under the supporting wall like he had instructed).
As to the likelyhood of terrorists attacking the power grid in the US, why not, taking out 2-3 major trunklines by taking out a single tower per line would result in several day blackouts as the lines were repaired, and if done in rural areas and done with timed explosives it could be accomplished with little chance of being caught.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Hmm, I'd have to disagree. For just the two days that we were out, it's not a big deal... it's actually kind of novel, an adventure. But it sounds like you weren't here:
- You can't cook anything if you have an electric stove. Sure, you can live off peanut butter & jelly, and canned tuna for a few days; but that's going to get old really quick. Lunch meats & cheese spoil. Some people are lucky enough to have charcoal or gas grill, but you can't store it for more than a day or two, and neither can stores.
- It's really tough to buy gasoline. There were only a handful of places with power to run the pumps or the credit card machines, and at some point everyone realized, "Hey, I have only about a 1/4 tank of gas, and this may last more than a day..." and rushed to the gas stations to wait in long lines.
- You can't access your e-mail, the internet, watch TV, listen to the radio (unless you have battery-powered radio, or in your car; but remember, gas is hard to come by, and batteries only last so long). Even if you can listen to the radio, most of the radio stations are out; those that are on are talking about the power outage. Now, I don't really watch that much TV or play many games, so I have many ways of seeking entertainment that don't require electricity; but how many Americans are used to doing that?
- There is no A/C, no fans, no ice, and after a day the water from the tap wasn't potable: it was pretty hot and humid, with no relief.
In the winter, because most heating systems have electronic switches, there would be no heat either (though that's easier to deal with: everybody has coats and blankets).
- Think of all the economic havoc that's going to be wreaked. The entire production of the city of Detroit was shut down for at least a day! This is going to reverberate through the stock markets and financial things pretty soon.
Anyway, the point of terrorism isn't to kill people; the point of terrorism is to make large amounts of people live in fear of something, and through this to put pressure on the goverment. Imagine that Al Qaida managed to do this once a month without being caught, each time demanding, "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?TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.