Blackout Cause: Buggy Code

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Posted by michael on Thursday February 12, 2004 @01:31AM from the civilization-meets-the-woodpecker dept.

blanca writes "The big northeast blackout from last summer was caused in part by a software bug in an energy managment system sold by General Electic, according to a story on SecurityFocus. The bug meant that a computerized alarm that should have been triggered never went off, hindering FirstEnergy's response to the train of events that lead to the cascading blackout. Investigators found the bug in a intensive code audit following the outage, and a patch is now available."

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Uh... by Short+Circuit · 2004-02-12 01:32 · Score: 5, Interesting

Didn't the story used to be that after a tech maintenenced the machine, he forgot to re-enable an alarm?

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Re:Development vs Engineering by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-12 03:01 · Score: 5, Interesting

In Canada, "Engineer" is a protected term, like "Doctor."

Doctor is not a protected term. Perhaps you mean "Medical Doctor"? There are lots of non-medical doctors.

I was arguing once with a MD friend of mine who thought that PhDs (like myself) don't have the right to call themselves Doctor. I explained that while medicince has been around for a very long time, the degree of MD has not. PhDs degrees have a much longer history than MD degrees.

It gets very funny when another friend of mine (who has a PhD in nursing) is called "Dr" in her hospital.
Re:50MV arc'd to a tree by plover · 2004-02-12 04:04 · Score: 5, Interesting

My property abuts a set of high voltage transmission lines. (I'm about three miles from a coal plant.) The lines cut a long, skinny park through my city. The plat for the site shows a 200 foot wide easement, which is about 30 meters to the property on either edge of the park. I've never measured the height of the towers, but my rough guess is that the line itself is perhaps 25 meters above ground. That puts the line itself about 39 meters from the edge of my property.
The land beneath the lines was clear-cut about 12 years ago. But there are now trees under this line that are about 10 meters high.
Years ago when my wife was concerned about "power line emissions" the power company loaned her a meter that showed "electrical fields." I don't remember the scale, or even what it was supposed to measure, but I do remember that we had to actually get about 200 feet from the wire before the field from the line stopped affecting the meter. (Yes, on a humid summer day I once stood in my back yard with a neon bulb and caused it to illuminate by simply dangling a three foot wire from one lead and touching the other.) I had always assumed it was a 750kV line, and that the 100 foot easement was more than sufficient. Now, I wonder. Hey, maybe this is enough of an excuse to go out and get one of those IKE toys!

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John