comp.risks New Zealand (Auckland) power outage
Some utility industry observers are predicting Y2K power outages. It's difficult to know what that could mean. The real-life case in New Zealand may increase understanding...
From: risko@csl.sri.com (RISKS List Owner)
Newsgroups: comp.risks
Subject: RISKS DIGEST 19.61
Date: 3 Mar 98 20:10:00 GMT
RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Tuesday 3 March 1998 Volume 19 : Issue 61
FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks)
ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator
[...]
Auckland city center shut down due to lack of power (Peter Gutmann)
[...]
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Date: Mon, 23 Feb 1998 09:12:05 +1300 (NZDT)
From: Peter Gutmann <pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz>
Subject: Auckland city center shut down due to lack of power
[Note: The message could not be sent from the above FROM: address,
because of the problem described below. I have substituted the
proper one. PGN]
The city of Auckland has its power provided by Mercury Energy, who have
three 110kV lines (two main ones and a backup) and a 27kV line (another
backup) feeding the central business district. Most of these cables have
copper conductors inside a pressurized nitrogen jacket (apparently we're one
of the few countries which use these), one of them is oil-filled. The
cables are supposedly around 40 years old with an overall life expectancy of
60 years, the suspicion is that the El Nino summer has dried out and heated
the ground so that vibration and ground movement (shrinkage) have damaged
the cables.
Because of this, all the cables have failed, leaving the central city
without power. 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, the Auckland central post office buildings, customs and
immigration, some sections of inland revenue, Aucklands main hospital and
medical school complex (they have generators, but one of them failed,
leaving the childrens hospital without power), the university, and God knows
what else (many of these places have generators, but there were apparently
glitches in switching over and one or two breakdowns which have caused
problems). 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 a web site mercury.co.nz with updates on
the situation, this is a Mercury Energy site so be aware that it's 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).
Various data points:
- The mayor has told businesses in the central city to either close down or
relocate for at least a week.
- At first the estimated time to repair was a week, now the official estimate
being fed to the media is 1-3 weeks but the estimate from power company
workers is a month at least (these figures change constantly, they seem to be
getting worse).
- In the last five years, Mercury Energy have followed the present economic
wisdom of aiming for efficiency and a good return to their shareholders (the
Mercury Trust) and have reduced their field workforce by half. In addition
for the last three years their energy has been poured mostly into an
(ultimately fruitless) struggle to take over their neighbouring power
supplier, Power NZ.
- Workers from other power companies are being brought in and working in
civvies to hide the extent of the problem. Workers were flown in from
Sydney, Australia to fix the cables, the estimate is that it'll take about a
week without power to redo these, and if the load placed on them is too high
they'll fail again.
- Apparently the idea of moving ships from the naval base on the other side of
the harbour across to the Auckland waterfront to act as floating generators
was considered, but there are problems with feeding the power from the ships
to the city. There's also the problem that there's nothing around which can
generate enough power to supply even a fraction of the power requirements.
- Because the central city was without power, there was a civil defence callout
to avoid a potential crime wave. Police were called in from other parts of
the city to patrol the city center. The lack of power is affecting building
access control systems and alarms, buildings have to have doors propped open
so people can get in or out, so there's no real protection for the building
contents. The services of private security firms are in great demand.
- Since water and sewage rely on electrically-driven pumps to get them into
office blocks and towers, these services weren't supposed to be available
either, however one cable is now repaired and, while it lasts is (barely)
providing power which is being used by emergency and civil services as far as
possible, with other services like traffic lights being run if there's
anything to spare.
- In one 10-15 story office block, sprinklers were activated by the power
outages and continued spraying water into the building for quite some time.
A comment from someone who saw the aftermath was "They may as well demolish
the building and start again".
- One company flew in a generator from Poland to try and keep things running.
The lack of power is a UPS vendors dream, they're almost impossible to
obtain. One company asked that their order of UPS's be shipped with a full
charge.
- From talking to people in various affected central city buildings, as soon as
the power comes back on the affected law firms will be handling enough
lawsuits to keep them in clover for years. In theory the current commercial
monopolies inherited the privileged positions of the old Power Boards from
which they're descended, making it impossible to sue them for failing to
provide a service, however it's not unlikely that the combined legal
resources of everyone they've annoyed will find some way to get to them
(there are probably armies of lawyers sitting around candles right now
scrutinising the relevant legislation). The Prime Minister has already made
a plea for people not to engage in a witch-hunt against Mercury Energy.
- The power outages did bring out some good things though. After the power had
been out for about half an hour on the first day, someone mentioned that the
fridges downstairs wouldn't be powered. In the spirit of true cooperation
and self-sacrifice, everyone immediately rushed downstairs and saved all the
beer from getting warm.
The risks here are fairly obvious: Everything is concentrated into the central
business district, there's no way to feed in power from anywhere else even if
it were available, there's no way to allocate power based on how critical the
services are beyond a very crude level (the few buildings which have generators
or some other way to get power have air conditioning, lights, and whatever else
running full tilt as usual, while less privileged buildings have no power or
power-related services), and going for efficiency and profit rather than
reliability for an essential service like this is very risky.
The only real benefit I can see from this is that it'll serve as a great case
study for the Infowar crowd, although the fact that it's due to simple cable
faults rather than assorted Rube Goldberg devices may make it slightly less
appealing for them.
Peter
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