What caused power surge in San Francisco? Is it related to any type of Y2K testing?

-- Anonymous, December 08, 1998

Answers

L.W.

Occourding to the local new, one of the sub-stations atomated systems detected high frecquincy levels and it shut the hole city down. Over 350,000 custermers without power. The mayor told very body to go home. Grid-lock, tafic accadets, know one knows how to drive in the city with out stop lights! People are huger store are closed, they cant get there morning coffee. BART has stopped trains have stopped, there computers dont work the airplanes cant land or take off. life as we know it has ended, ( temperarly? well maybe, at lest to the year 2000! )

Mark

-- Anonymous, December 08, 1998

Here's a story that relates the current SF power outage to Y2k: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/wr/story.html?s=v/nm/19981208/wr/ power_1.html

And here's another that discusses the cause of the outage: http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/981208/bb0.html

-- Anonymous, December 08, 1998

Some workers in a substation were trying to adjust 2, 115 kilovolt lines manually, they improperly grounded them and blew 2 the 2 main generators etc. offline. So much for running the systems manually after Y2k if this is any indication of what to expect.

-- Anonymous, December 09, 1998

Here's an anonymous post from another forum:

"Just talked to a friend of mine who knows a guy that was working on that crew. Boy are they pissed! They had re-routed the supply source through another channel so they could replace one of the old units with non-compliant chips. They hooked up the new unit and switched the source power back through it. He said that sonfabitch must not have been rated to handle that much juice cause she just fried. Now he's pissed cause the President of PG&E is telling the news that they grounded it out. I don't think changing all of those parts is going to be as easy as they think."

Don't know if it should be taken with a grain of salt or not...

Posted to Ed Yourdon's website.

-- Anonymous, December 09, 1998

Let's see here... an anonymous post from a guy who spoke to a friend of his who happened to know a guy on the crew who's mad at his boss.... hmmmmmmm. Well, I kinda feel like this one needs more seasoning than salt to make it palatable. Geez! Credibility score = Goose Egg!

-- Anonymous, December 09, 1998