Word: blackouts
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...Failure," on the theory of Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman that streets are actually safer without road signs, reminded me of an incident that occurred in Auckland one extremely wet weekday in winter [Feb. 25]. At 8 a.m., at the height of the rush hour, there was a major blackout that affected the entire city and lasted about four hours. All traffic lights were out. Police on point duty manned four major intersections in the CBD, and one or two others were manned for brief periods by public-minded citizens who did not mind getting soaked. Police later reported that...
Floridians could not have been caught more unaware by Tuesday's massive, afternoon-long blackout. Although temperatures have been unseasonably high this month, they were hardly torrid enough to overload the peninsula's air conditioners. It wasn't hurricane season, either, when tropical storms regularly knock out power lines. It was a tranquil, balmy afternoon by the beach - the sort of "paradise" so many thousands of people migrate here for each winter...
Aside from the transit nightmare, the Florida blackout also revived the awful memory of August 2003, when an even larger grid failure in the Northeast left 15 million people in the dark. Improvements to America's electrical reliability system have been put in place the past five years; but Tuesday was a reminder that the country's power infrastructure is still more vulnerable than many feel it ought to be. According to research by three scholars at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, the average U.S. electrical utility customer experiences 214 minutes of power outage each year - compared...
Florida Power & Light (FPL), the giant South Florida utility that runs Turkey Point and the Miami substation where the blackout started, has yet to discover why the breaker that should have isolated the fire problem failed. "These systems are all designed to handle two contingencies," FPL President Armando Olivera told the Miami Herald. "We still don't have a full understanding of what happened." Says former Florida Public Service Commission Chairman Joe Garcia, a Democratic congressional candidate, "Obviously, they've got some explaining to do. There should have been units [compensating] in other parts of the state to make sure...
Both America's electrical hardware and software components, Makovich concedes, are still dealing with "a legacy of underinvestment." In the decade before the 2003 blackout, for example, annual electrical transmission investment in the U.S. grew only about 20%. Between 2005 and 2010 it's expected to jump by some 65%, to about $15 billion - a level many U.S. infrastructure critics feel the country should have been at by the beginning of the this century, not a decade into...