US Power Outages

[Eric Davis]

At 11:02 PM 8/11/96, Bill Stewart wrote:

>It surprises me how little these systems appear to be monitored.
>It took some hours for them to decide that the brush fire on the
>California border didn't cause the system to shut down;
>you'd think they'd know quickly that the subsystem shut itself down
>or disconnected from the grid or whatever because of reason #17...

The fire "story" was, I guess, a result of excessive media fodder.
(whatever sells the headlines....)

Example: This morning (Monday 7:00am PST)
STATION A: Replayed a recorded press briefing, with a head from PG&E,
stating that the cause is *not* yet known, however it *MIGHT* have something
to do with the excessive loads/demands on the system during the high
temp season. (AC units running, etc..)
       -- minutes later --
STATION B: A newsperson *read* the news. This person stated, "At a recent
press briefing, a PG&E official said the outage *WAS* caused by excessive loads.
(quoting the same briefing that I just heard, from the source, on STATION A)

Thank you Mass Media!

Eric

Reminds me of the aftermath of the last large SF quake.
I lived in Santa Cruz at the time. After the quake we all kicked
back and had a large yard party to kill the time. An, un-named, news
network was broadcasting, nation wide, live telephone calls from people
in the SF area. One call was from a person in Santa Cruz, or so he said.
He told the news network, and at the same time live to the nation, that
Santa Cruz was completely leveled, dead bodies everywhere, and only a
handfull of people seemed to have survive.
Needless to say my Grandparents in Tennessee were not to excited...

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Eric Davis                        ericd at cyberfarm.com
Co-Founder MediaCast:       http://www.mediacast.com/
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