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US/Canada Power Outage Task Force Event Timeline
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."
12:05:44 - 1:31:34 PM - Four Generator trips
2:02:00 - 2:02:00 PM - Transmission line disconnects in southwestern Ohio
3:05:41 - 3:41:33 PM - Transmission lines disconnect between eastern Ohio and northern Ohio
3:45:33 - 4:08:58 PM - Remaining transmission lines disconnect from eastern into northern Ohio
4:08:58 - 4:10:27 PM - Transmission lines into northwestern Ohio disconnect, and generation trips in central Michigan
4:10:00 - 4:10:38 PM - Transmission lines disconnect across Michigan and northern Ohio, generation trips off line in northern Michigan and northern Ohio, and northern Ohio separates from Pennsylvania
4:10:40 - 4:10:44 PM - Four transmission lines disconnect between Pennsylvania and New York
4:10:41 - 4:10:41 PM - Transmission line disconnects and generation trips in northern Ohio
4:10:42 - 4:10:45 PM - Transmission paths disconnect in northern Ontario and New Jersey, isolating the northeast portion of the Eastern Interconnection
4:10:46 - 4:10:55 PM - New York splits east-to-west. New England (except Southwestern Connecticut) and the Maritimes separate from New York and remain intact.
4:10:50 - 4:11:57 PM - Ontario separates from New York west of Niagara Falls and west of St. Lawrence. Southwestern Connecticut separates from New York and blacks out.
n/t
The blame will be put onderegulation and lack of government oversight.
5:08 PM - U.S./Canada Power Outage Task Force web server goes out.
The coolest voice ever.
12.04 - power on
14.11 - power off
Comment: Yes I realise the username 'fuckfuck101' makes me sound intelligent, no you cannot buy it from me.
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();
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.
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.
.02$
just my
"We're can't say for certain what happened and when, but we can say with almost 90% certainty that when the power went out, people went without power. We think it might be related to some electrical do-hickey thingy that someone was supposed to be watching carefully in case it broke, but we're not confident enough to make that bold a statement... nor to claim that anything actually 'broke'.
"But what we *can* say is that we feel strongly that we feel something different should have happened. An appropriate amount of blame will be laid... oh yes... and we'll make the bad people pay."
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
0x0D 0x0A
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--
http://www.nrcan-rncan.gc.ca/media/documents/Blac
I think I will be fair and equitable and allow Slashdot to take out a Canadian website as well. Please be kind to Natural Resources Canada.
There are two things you need to keep in mind here. The first is that phase in AC systems performs much the same function as voltage in DC systems; just as power flows from higher voltage to lower voltage across a DC connection, power flows from leading phase to lagging phase along an AC connection. (This has to do with reactance; all power lines are inductive.) Counterintuitively, voltage helps move power but it mostly balances VARs (volt-amperes reactive); if you have a local low-voltage situation, you can connect a capacitor to add some VARs and the voltage will come up. This is part of why big inductive loads cause line voltage to dip.
The second thing is that frequency variation is just a phase change over time. If the local frequency falls for a bit, it means that the local phase is moving behind the rest of the grid. This is what you would expect if some large load was added (or a generator lost) and more power had to come from elsewhere on the grid; the delta-phase across the interconnecting lines has to shift to allow more power to flow. What little energy buffering there is is mostly the rotational energy of generators and motors, so phase changes don't quite happen instantaneously.
If you had a serious local power shortage leading to shutdown, under-frequency is exactly what you would expect. Generators trip off-line, and the phase of the local grid backs off to pull more power from outside. It would take a full second at 59 Hz to shift one cycle, so this can go on for a fair fraction of a second. If the phase change over a transmission line increases past 90 degrees it will have to trip off-line, and once the local grid is an island you can have just about any frequency that the system will try to operate at. It's my understanding that most generators trip off-line at more than a fractional Hz off 60, if for no other reason than that they aren't designed or certified to operate on a grid that's obviously malfunctioning and such a condition means trouble. Mechanical resonances at off-operating rotational speeds are another reason to shut down.
Last, I suspect your conclusion is correct.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
It took this long to get an official timeline? Hmm. Makes me think that maybe there's some of this going on.
No. The Voltage component of Power is important when managing the health of the bulk power grid. For those that don't remember, Power is Volts Amps, and because current is directional, power is directional also. This is why people often use "power flow"...
The impedence in line in a function of the amount of energy flowing through it; as current increases, capacitive losses increase, causing the voltages at the ends to drop. This is sometimes called surge impedence loading. Impedence across a power line is constantly changing, and it is easier to wrap both variables into Power.
Next, the use of transformers makes amps by themselves meaningless. Power is near constant across a transformer, so High Amps Low Voltage can become Low Amps High Voltage. By talking about everything in the form of Power, then you can easily measure the transfer of energy between the various voltage levels of your system, which eases explaining the system.
Finally, Power is an easily understood market concept. If I run a generator at a low voltage (13kV), and produce 10 Amps, I'm generating 130 kW. I pipe that through a large number of transformers & lines, and deliver it to a load running at 23kV, and maybe tomorrow I sell it to someone at 9kV. By keeping everyone running in Power notation, we can all agree that money is exchanged for work, and the proper energy is delivered and paid for.