Passenger Trains > San Fran Blackout Shuts Down City And Transportation

Excerpt from article:

"Benjamin W. Feldman took this photo in the Montgomery BART Station during a power outage that hit large areas of San Francisco on April, 21, 2017"

Article here:

http://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Authorities-San-Francisco-blackout-not-linked-to-11090324.php



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/21/17 15:38 by Out_Of_Service.

Power blackouts also occurred in Los Angeles and New York City in nearly the same timeframe.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/21/17 16:00 by norm1153.

The San Francisco blackout received news coverage here in Los Angeles. As of mid-afternoon the power was still out...the reported prediction of "power to be restored within an hour" (~ 2 pm Pacific time) was overly optimistic.

It was out in a limited area, connected to an equipment failure in a sub-station. It was not similar to the outages in LA and NYC.

Remember, correlation is not causation!

(An interesting sideline of the SF outage -- it also temporarily knocked out the outage map of PG&E, so at the peak of the outage it only showed one home near Pacific Heights without power.)

Not counting the above ground street cars and buses, the power outage only effected the closing of one BART / Muni Station because of loss of lighting (Montgomery).

Gary

Posted from iPhone

San Francisco blackout was caused by the failure of a high voltage circuit breaker at a sub-station which resulted in a fire.
PG&E says they should have everything back up this evening.

norm1153 Wrote:
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> Power blackouts also occurred in Los Angeles and
> New York City in nearly the same timeframe.

Actually, NYC and SF were in nearly the same timeframe, but not LA, which occurred the night before. What should I know, I was accused by another TO member that I don't check other news sources. :-)

Off topic, but this reminded me of an incident that happened almost two decades ago that some retired telecommunications employee friends told me. There was a severe outage that brought down several parts of the network, and of course, some customers noticed. So did some agencies (FBI and Secret Service - NSA's existence was "unconfirmed" at the time, so my friend isn't sure if they noticed, too). They made their presence known, and employees were "questioned" until the root cause was found.

News cycle was slower back then, so the outage didn't make the front page. The network came back up before panic ensued, so there was no need to release news to allay paranoia. So I'm not going to dismiss your statement, because more often than not, human intuition (and first impression) is correct.

Root cause of the telecommunications outage? Software bug! Once that was determined with certainty, the agency folks disappeared.