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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Why the power went out
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The report labels Cause 1 as "Inadequate Situational Awareness," and Cause 3 as "Failure of the interconnected grid's reliability organizations to provide effective diagnostic support." The crucial event under the Cause 1 heading was the failure of an alarm system: "...[Alarm and logging software failed sometime shortly after 14:14 EDT... operators were working under a significant handicap without these tools. However, they were in further jeopardy because they did not know that they were operating without alarms..."
Cause (2) was a failure to properly trim tree branches near powerlines. The amazing thing is how they got a system with no alarms. Did no one ever test the system to make sure alarms were raised? Kind of makes me wonder how many other untested alarm systems have been deployed into mission critical systems....
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