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Bad "Buss Duct" Causes Week-long Closure of 5,000 Employee Federal Complex
McGruber (1417641) writes In Atlanta, an electrical problem in a "Buss Duct" has caused the Sam Nunn Atlanta Federal Center to be closed for at least a week. 5,000 federal employees work at the center. While many might view this as another example of The Infrastructure Crisis in the USA, it might actually be another example of mismanagement at the complex's landlord, the General Service Administration (GSA). Probably no one wants to go to work in an Atlanta July without a working A/C.
It's not a link. Someone put an .. tag around text, there's no href component with a URL provided.
An electrical problem effects power to a signle building, this is news? This has nothing to do with "failing infrastructure" like old bridges, highway maintenance, or such. It's an electrical problem in a single building.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
If you don't know, buss duct is a power distribution component. It generally carries at least 1000 amps, sometimes much more depending on size. So... Yeah. Basically no power in probably half the building.
The Infrastructure Crisis is a valid link. The rest of it is borked.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
For those who are wondering, a "buss duct" is a duct that contains "busbars", which are generally large flat copper bars that conduct substantial current.
From the Wikipedia...
The cross-sectional size of the busbar determines the maximum amount of current that can be safely carried. Busbars can have a cross-sectional area of as little as 10 mm2 but electrical substations may use metal pipes of 50 mm in diameter or more as busbars. An aluminium smelter will have very large busbars used to carry tens of thousands of amperes to the electrochemical cells that produce aluminium from molten salts.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
A fool's drivel repeated often enough will some day end up in the lexicon, especially in the moden age of instant mass communications, but that does not make it correct.
"Buss" is not a word, but because there was an electrical manufacturing company called "Bussman" that makes fuses, and people would often shorten it to "Buss Fuses", other illiterates have created a spurious spelling that uses "buss" instead of "bus". It's still incorrect however, in spite of the illiterates repeating it on the internet.
This holds true within the electrical trade, as many old-timers frequently write (not type!) "buss" -- I often see it on equipment labels, one-line drawings, etc.
Beware of the Leopard.
That building complex was overhauled in 1997 by Inglett & Stubbs electrical contractors, who did $14 million of electrical work. This failure may or may not be their fault, but it's not because of neglected infrastructure.
Those settlers were not required to sit still inside during the hottest part of the day.
Here is a link to a story about the outage.
Therefore, the chiller plant and a large portion of the building’s electrical grid were rendered inoperable
It is also difficult to work without lights, computers, routers, PBX, etc.
The question is whether appropriate maintenance was done subsequently; a failure to do so would indeed constitute a symptom of the infrastructure crisis, which is often caused by routine maintenance being cut as a 'painless' cost saving for a financially strapped government. Then it comes back and bites them...
Which during the hot months that did in the mornings and evenings and not a 9-5 schedule so they can coordinate with the rest of the country.
"Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun"
I worked for a company in the 2009 time frame where the AC went out regularly in the summer months in Houston. I came in after a stay in the hospital to an office that was 95 degrees. July anywhere on the Gulf Coast can be bad, but in August/September, it's even worse.
Many of the effected people are not government employees, they are hourly contractors doing clerical and office work. They either have to take vacation or go without pay, and not getting paid for a week when you are making maybe $15/hour is not pleasant. Some can work from home but since the outage was unexpected they may not have their work laptop at home. How do I know this? I have a friend who works there.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
into the same structure per the National Electrical Code. Only exception is for different voltages, etc.
Every building has some electrical switchgear that constitutes a "single point of failure", and it is mandated to do so by code. Simplifies cutting off power by first responders in an emergency, etc.
Buss duct is generally not stocked by local distributors, and may have been custom made to order (angle/offsets/termination sections anyway) so depending on what exactly burned up, they could be a while sourcing replacement parts.
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Actually, the ultra rich had their taxes raised recently (2012). Perhaps you mean something else? Please explain if you do.
God bless America! indeed!
It's a regular template among the privatization crowd. Government only had to accomplish X but screwed up here, here, and here. Privatize and that won't happen. Barely hidden assumptions include: private operations never screw up, private operations never cheat.
Yes, I am aware. However, I do not care what the ultra rich paid in taxes in 1960 or 1945. I do not really care about what they pay in 2014 either. But the idea that their taxes are being cut and this somehow has something to do with the problem in the article is a fabrication.
Also, are you aware that it is a crime for a federal department head to fail to take steps to maintain and preserve federal property? At least that is what we were told during the shut down as the reasoning behind closing open air memorials off to aging vets and putting road blocks up to stop traffic from looking at Mount Rushmore or from visiting private businesses located on federal park property. So if this was because of lacking funds, someone broke a law and should have cut expenses somewhere else.
This actually is an infrastructure aging problem. And the incidence of buss duct failure has been increasing in older buildings. Many bus ducts installed in industrial and commercial facilities are immediately downstream of the transformers, but upstream of the main overcurrent device. Thus, transformer protection devices often inadequately protect the buss conductor from being fried by a short. I've seen them vaporized.
Such shorts occur due to water infiltration, corrosion, and most importantly in the summer, overheating. All three effects accumulate over time. If money were no object, every building would have a dual-buss electrical system, just like aircraft (and data centers) do. Alas, money is an object.
No, the assumption is that when the private operator screws up he will get fired and replaced. This is unlike someone protected by the Civil Service Act, who is next to impossible to fire. The template of most in the privatization crowd (excepting those who are really just pushing to move that money to their cronies) is that the private operator will have greater incentive to avoid screwing up in order to avoid getting fired, while the "civil servant" has no such fear. Whether or not that template is accurate is another question entirely.
Apparently you are unaware of this basic economic principle which those who push privatization take as a basic assumption.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
You ask a very good question, and it is a very good one. If the contractor screwed up, he should get fired. However, the failure to fire the private contractor is not a problem with privatization, but with government. As an example, the VA administrators who went beyond screwing up to active misconduct not only did not get fired, they received bonuses...and their bosses initially attempted to claim that those bonuses could not be withdrawn.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Really think about it is there some filter that puts idiots in to government employment while private industry only get the goods ones while paying a lower wage?
Sort of. It's generally referred to as "job security". Most government agencies have both good and worthless employees. The thing is, in government, the worthless employees are almost impossible to get rid of. So those agencies can never be as efficient as a company that can hire people at-will, and can cut staff that is not contributing. Yes, it's possible to fire government employees, but it's very difficult, and it requires putting resources into all the paperwork required to make it happen and avoid lawsuits. And there are all kinds of things that go on in government that perpetuates that, such as tribute, PC issues, long-term employees with strategic relationships, etc. And so the response when more resources are needed is never to look for the lowest-level contributors, but to simply hire more people to make up for the dead weight.
Of course this issue is not strictly limited to government, it can happen to some degree in any old, large bureaucratic organization. But since most government agencies fall into that category, and exist in perpetuity, and rarely if ever face budget cuts, it's more pervasive in government than in private industry.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Down at the bottom line though is that privitization can never be as cheap as optimal government services. Function X costs at least Y to perform. Even under ideal conditions, a private contractor can at best deliver it for Y+a profit. Supporters of privitization believe that the private corporation will be so much more efficient that that higher amount will still be less than it costs to do internally.
Of course, once you add all the overhead of dealing with the many checks and balances and all the metrics and paperwork to make sure the private contractor isn't cheating, you inevitably drive those nimble and efficient private contractors away leaving NG and their ilk to win the contracts. Every last bit of that bureaucratic bloat plus a hefty profit will be added to the bill. That includes the small army of lawyers on retainer to make sure that if anything goes wrong, it will somehow be the government's fault so they can tack the overruns on to the bill. Eventually, that procedure becomes easier and more profitable than keeping costs down. That happens with or without a legislated contract.
There is a balance to be struck. For example, while it is probably cheaper for the government to buy the toilet paper itself, it is probably not a good idea for it to actually manufacture the paper.