'Auckland's Power Outage or Auckland - Your Y2K Beta Test Site
Last updated 24 May 1998
The following writeup is a (hopefully) more balanced view of what's
going on than the one being provided through official channels, I'll
keep this updated as new information comes to hand. If anyone has
comments or updates on this, please send them to peterg@kcbbs.gen.nz,
or pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz after power is restored.
The city of Auckland, with a population of just over a million people, is New
Zealands largest city and has its power provided by Mercury Energy, who have
four 110kV cables feeding the central business district. Because of one or
more of the reasons given below, all the cables have failed, leaving the
central city without power since the 20th of February. So far this has
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, many of the major city hotels, a virtual who's who of national and
multinational companies and corporations, 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. It's
possible 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).
Mercury have a web site mercury.co.nz which contains updates on the
situation somewhere on it, be aware that this site is subject to the usual
degree of spin control (there have been discrepancies to date between their
statements to the media and what's actually happening, and power-outage related
pages on their site tend to appear and disappear at random as it suits them).
....
cs.auckland.ac.nz |
