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US/Canada Power Outage Task Force Event Timeline

Posted by michael on from the alone-in-the-dark dept.

bofus writes "The U.S./Canada Power Outage Task Force issued the Aug. 14, 2003 Sequence of Events at noon today. While no conclusions are drawn at this point, it does paint a pretty good picture of what happened and when it happened."

6 of 303 comments (clear)

  1. The blame game by trolman · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The really bizarre part that has not been explained is that the frequency deviated. I saw frequency deviation alarms on my equipment (ups and pdus) on the data center floor in NY, NJ, and CT and this is the first time in my 20 years that this has happened. A glaring ommission is is that PJM stayed up as an entity. Kudos to PJM.

    The blame will be put onderegulation and lack of government oversight.

  2. MSBlaster.exe by devphaeton · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Has anyone followed up or concluded anything regarding the possibility of the power grid's SCADA systems (which habitually run a stripped down Win2K) getting nailed by the Blaster worm? The timing is right, and there are a number of indications thereof:
    See:

    this or
    this or
    this.

    --


    do() || do_not(); // try();
    1. Re:MSBlaster.exe by gregmac · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Has anyone followed up or concluded anything regarding the possibility of the power grid's SCADA systems (which habitually run a stripped down Win2K)

      I've still never understood this. I think most systems are actually based on NT, but maybe they are migrating to 2k now. Either way, the fact that these automation systems are based on a system like windows is very strange to me. OPC (the protocol used to communicate between sensors and databases) is based on DDE (or OLE), which seems so incredibly strange to me.

      I've been developing a linux-based SCADA system. I took a look at quite a few systems, and I just didn't feel comfortable running any of them for a number of reasons. Stability and security being two major issues. Another was cost - these are being deployed in small installations, mostly for remote monitoring, which wouldn't typically have a SCADA system due to the cost. Between a mixture of existing open source software, some nice hardware, and in-house development (mostly me), the system has cost us about $20k to develop, which is less than it would cost to licence most software per site.

      Anyways, that was a bit OT, but the point is, very early on we decided that deploying on windows would be a pain. These are all remote installations, with no one on site that can service them. If something goes down, I want to be able to remotely fix it as much as possible. I just don't feel comfortable deploying a remote windows system and relying on it to stay running, not to mention the fact that people's health could be affected (water treatment). To me, windows is not the proper platform to be using for this situation.

      --
      Speak before you think
  3. Bloomberg by oZZoZZ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Mayor of NYC decided to publicly blame Canada for this before any facts surfaced.. while Lastman, the mayor of Toronto said something along the lines of "Do you expect the US to take blame for anything?", after *some* facts surfaced
    Neither responses were politically acceptable, however the media coverage of the blame game seemed to evaporate as soon as it was clear that it wasn't Canada's fault.
    I found that more than a little interesting.

  4. Late Night "Wacko" Talk Radio by GSpot · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A couple of days after the blackout, I was staying up late and unfortunatley listed to some late night radio. Two different kooks were speculating on the cause of the blackout. One was positive that the Federal government was testing out some "advanced" weapon and the other freak was convinced that the culprit was the power companies looking for an edge to justify raising rates to build more infrastructure.

    just my .02$

  5. Disturbances Before Outage Itself by shoemakc · · Score: 4, Interesting


    Did anyone else notice a strobing effect in their fluorescent lighting in those 20-30 seconds before the full power outage? My understanding is that any sort of arc lamp (fluorescent, metal halide) will extinguish if the voltage sags beyond a certain point, so I doubt it could have been a voltage sag before the full blackout.

    It almost seemed as if the power frequency itself had gone unstable...say from a nominal 60Hz to like 5Hz. Then again, with the modern electronic ballasts used today, who knows how they respond to a voltage sag. Maybe they strobe. Any one have any thoughts on this?

    -Chris

    --
    --an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--