SoCal Power Loss

[perlster]

Supposedly, Hotmail, Windows Live, etc. services were down for about three hours.

Microsoft tweet : "Preliminary root cause suggests a DNS issue ..."

a DNS issue?!

 

[LisainCalifornia]

I am glad it was only 8 hours in most areas.

When I lived in San Francisco in 1989, we had the 7.0 earthquake that knocked our power out for 4 days. We had no internet or cell phones (obviously). The worst part was not having hot water for showers and not being able to drink the tap water (there were warnings against it after the quake).

I know it is much worse for people who lived through other disasters--like Hurricane Katrina or other natural disasters who go for so long without power and also have their homes destroyed.

 

[skiingfast]

I am glad it was only 8 hours in most areas.

When I lived in San Francisco in 1989, we had the 7.0 earthquake that knocked our power out for 4 days. We had no internet or cell phones (obviously). The worst part was not having hot water for showers and not being able to drink the tap water (there were warnings against it after the quake).

And it delayed the Battle of the Bay. But I was lucky my dad made it home from work that day.


Living far from California I remember the outage from the Northridge Quake which was quite strange being no where near it.

The worst outage, that I didn't experience, but have friends and thier parents who did. It got cold and the power lines snapped. A lot of heat was from electric at the time. Cars wouldn't start. Snow blocked people from driving in. Baby formula was dropped from planes. This caused wood stove installations to soar afterward.

It's all relative. The worst disaster I've experienced was the Loma Preata quake, and in the only negative that happened to me, is I did school home work on the lawn.

 

[Squirrel!!!]

I am in San Diego and we were without power until 10PM so my husband headed off to downtown and his job to see if he could start working on whatever IT computer mess had reared its ugly head, and he got as far as the freeway and saw that our little neighborhood seemed to be the only shiny spot around. We are near Qualcom stadium so not far from downtown, really.

We felt special, turned on out ceiling fans and slept well. Most areas around us didn't get power until 2AM.

Schools were cancelled by 8:30PM so a lot of parents are scrambling today for childcare.

 

[sonnyjane]

Oh so that's what that was!?! Over here on the complete other side of the world I couldn't access my hotmail account and couldn't work out why!

Does anyone know what caused it?

According to news articles, apparently a worker in Arizona was working on a line and made a BIG "oops", and it cut power to us here in SD. They aren't releasing details on him for obvious reasons lol.

 

[Disney Dreams]

...Does anyone know what caused it?

"A massive power outage caused by a tripped wire hit a wide area of Southern California on Thursday afternoon exposing millions of people to the summer heat.

The outage affects residents of the Coachella Valley, Orange County, San Diego County, parts of Mexico, Arizona and possibly New Mexico.

The California Independent System Operator released a statement late Thursday explaining the cause of the outage. A spokesman said there was a "major disturbance" between Arizona and Southern California in a transmission line.

"The outage was triggered after a 500-kilovolt (kV) high-voltage line from Arizona to California tripped out of service," the spokesman said. "The transmission outage cut the flow of imported power into the most southern portion of California, resulting in wide-spread outages in the region...."

"The Arizona Power Service described the cause of the blackout as an "employee-generated event," saying in a statement that an employee was replacing equipment at a substation near Yuma.

It did not say what the employee was working on in the substation that would have led to such a massive failure in the line that imports power to California and Mexico.

"Normal protection protocols should have prevented the outage. But this time, they didn't," said Damon Gross, an Arizona Power Service spokesman.
Daniel Froetscher, a vice president at the utility, told reporters it was premature to call it "human error," saying it would take several days to complete an investigation."

I think the key isn't exactly what that one employee did or didn't do, but why the system itself didn't have safeties in place to stop ONE WIRE being tripped from having such wide-reaching effects.

We had plumbing issues in our house this week. We shut off all water leading to one toilet and the rest of the house was able to function perfectly until a plumber got out here two days later. Why one wire (no matter how major) can trip service to parts of Mexico, Arizona, and California seems like a huge problem that indicates something else that should have caught it, didn't function right. (Disclaimer: The most I know about electrical wiring is that I successfully put in the dimmer switch in our kitchen. So... chalk it up to opinion, not expert insight. )

- Dreams

 

[ConnieB]

I hear there is a job opening in Yuma at APS.