Hassayampa switchyard
One of my enduring memories of visiting Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines twenty years ago was passing by the base’s power plant. There was row after row of semi-truck-size 250kw diesel generators, all roaring away and belching unfiltered black smoke into the thick tropical air. The civilian power source frequently suffered brownouts so the base had to generate its own electricity.
I never thought that Naval Base San Diego would suffer the same conditions, but yesterday millions of San Diego residents lost power when a problem at a switching station in Arizona sent the San Diego County’s electrical grid crashing down within minutes. Being an electricity geek with a fascination for electrical malfunctions, I had to find out more about this situation.
According to the Arizona Public Service press release:
The outage appears to be related to a procedure an APS employee was carrying out in the North Gila substation, a press release stated.
Operating and protection protocols typically would have isolated the resulting outage to the Yuma area, but did not do so in this case. The reason they did not will be the focal point of an APS investigation into the event, which already is under way.
The Hassayampa-North Gila line (lower left) tripped offline, eventually causing the blackout.
The apparent cause in this case is the procedure one employee was undertaking. Even so, it points out the fragility of our electrical infrastructure. Why, after similar massive blackouts over the last few years, hasn’t someone devised a better way to deal with these malfunctions? How could we allow one person’s actions to disrupt power to millions of people, accidental or not?
Though this incident wasn’t terrorism-related, I’m firmly convinced that our power grid is vulnerable to hacker attack at basically any moment. Foreign governments have the ability to do it today (and we successfully used it against the Soviets), targeting the SCADA control devices that manage industrial equipment.
Fortunately, blackouts make poor terrorist incidents because its victims are literally in the dark. It’s hard to spread fear without the use of electricity. Now, if we can only design our electrical infrastructure so that it doesn’t take itself offline, we’ll be in good shape!
(Bonus links: “Blackout” video by Phillip Long. “Firefighter safety around transmission lines” video by APS.)