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.

Comments

Re:Link doesn't work

[apraetor]

It's not a link. Someone put an .. tag around text, there's no href component with a URL provided.

Earthshaking

[Frosty Piss]

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.

Re:Earthshaking

[Z00L00K]

This is only newsworthy because it was a big building with a single point of failure.

What we all can learn is to avoid single.points of failure in large systems.

Re:Earthshaking

[Anonymous Coward]

A large metal grid used to transmit lots of power within a building. It is a raceway for bus bars. They help dissipate more heat than using cables and can be tied onto at many points. This isn't a sign of a larger failing - it's a critical part of the building's systems that needed repair. It's not easy to repair while live.

We had a small fire when ours (in a NYC skyscraper) was accidentally shorted. It shut our building down for a couple of days as well (as the bus carried most of the larger loads like HVAC and elevators). We did still have lights and such.

Re:Earthshaking

[thegarbz]

Bus ducts are not off the shelf devices, they are normally custom made for the installation. Installation is also quite complex and slow but all these negatives come with really great benefit of the things being essentially maintenance free.

Which makes me wonder how they had a fault to begin with.

Re:Earthshaking

[TWX]

The fiber optic cables carrying the data had no problems being immersed

For the immediate emergency, no, they didn't.

Long-term, fiber is susceptible to water damage. I had a site that needed fiber replaced because the Christy vault was placed too low in the ground and got inundated with irrigation water. The fiber didn't even splice in the vault; it was just a pull-point where the conduit stubbed up into the vault and a new conduit dropped back down, but the conduits filled up and the fiber degraded fairly quickly despite being gel-filled OSP. For awhile we kept testing and moving to different strands as the ones we were on failed, but it didn't take long before it had to be replaced. Fortunately the contractor was able to eliminate that particular vault entirely, splicing the conduits together after getting the moisture out, and we haven't had a problem since.

Re:Link doesn't work

[Zero__Kelvin]

The Infrastructure Crisis is a valid link. The rest of it is borked.

What?

[Frosty Piss]

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.

It's not "buss" - its bus.

[Known Nutter]

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.

Re:It's not "buss" - its bus.

[Known Nutter]

You can be pedantic, but come on...I get it, language evolves, but a tech website like slashdot should get the tech vernacular correct, don't you think?

After all, "bus" is not foreign term to "nerds" now, is it? For example, the same term that describes "front side bus" also describes an electrical bus duct.

Re:17 years ago is a long time for such a system

[thegarbz]

No. Bus ducts are installed because of their high current and extremely low maintenance requirements.

Most bus duct systems I've worked on are on 10-20 year inspection regimes, and I have yet to encounter one, even some which are 50+ years old that actually needed maintenance. They are, or at least should be, sealed systems without so much as a spec of dust to cause problems.

The human side of the story

[Registered Coward v2]

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.

Multiple service entrances are not allowed

[Ellis D. Tripp]

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.

Re: Well, the GSA could start firing the contracto

[sjames]

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.

Re: Well, the GSA could start firing the contracto

[Attila Dimedici]

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.