I wrote:
A part of Aukland is finding out.
Peter G replies:
It's pretty serious, so far it's affected (at various times) a number of banking data centres (the first day the power went out was on the Thursday when everyones pay is supposed to be processed - the data centres themselves have generators, but the sources feeding them information don't), the stock exchange, some (unidentified) central city post office buildings, customs and immigration, inland revenue, internal affairs, social welfare, the Auckland City Council, the central police station, Aucklands main hospital and medical school complex (they have generators, but one of them failed, leaving the childrens hospital without power for awhile), the city campus of the university and technical institute (affecting 30,000 students in the middle of enrolment), several TV and radio stations, and God knows what else (the government departments have tentacles all over the city, so it's not so bad for them). Although many of these places have generators, there were various glitches in switching over and one or two breakdowns which have caused problems, and most of the generators can't handle anywhere near the load being placed on them but were designed to power only essential services. One comment I've heard is that the power company may not survive the lawsuits which follow this (taking out some suburb is serious enough, but taking out the central business district with its cluster of multinational accounting and legal firms, banks, government departments, and whatnot is really bad).
There's fairly detailed coverage of what's going on at http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/power.txt, with a temporary copy at http://www.kcbbs.gen.nz/users/peterg/power.txt (the Auckland site doesn't have power at the moment, the other one is located outside the city centre, I'll move things to the first site once power is restored).
Peter (usually pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz when we have power).
------------------------------------------------------------ David Honig Orbit Technology honig@otc.net Intaanetto Jigyoubu The Internet Protocol's only guarantee is that your packets will not clog the net.