> The animal had come into contact with the transformer at the station, disrupting supply to the entire country. There were no immediate details on whether the monkey survived the incident.
I'm sure the constituent atoms of the monkey survived.
I saw a video the other day of some human running and jumping on a transformer after hopping a fence, dancing on the transformer in a distribution site.
It ended as you'd expect, a bright light, a lot of curse words from the camera operator who was probably blinded temporarily.
If that's all it took to turn Srilanka off.Even if that country lags behind western Europe, what would it take for a few humans who intentionally cut off power.
Trying to stay on the facts, this incident is likely accidental but some people even the very workers at energy companies could send a message for, I don't know. A pay raise?
Isn't it amazing? In movies, evil terrorists take out the grid all the time (or threaten to), to terrible consequences, and they need genius hackers to do so. In reality, it's easy peasy and still, people hardly ever do it (and nobody (ish) dies if they do). Humans are good!
Yes, you can try to hold the country hostage for your salary by going on strike, but that's the sort of thing that results in very energetic union-busting.
Actually sabotaging the infrastructure would result in terrorism charges, or at the very least the JSO treatment.
I mean i'm pretty sure there are laws in place everywhere to avoid a single pay raise strike doing nation wide catastrophic events. Hospitals for example are usually limited in how they can strike.
That's assuming the people who want to strike care about having a job afterward. I know the state hospitals stop loss people when there's a disaster, so I keep abreast of predictable disasters and tell my wife and friends "hey you're sick, go get a doctor's note for the rest of the week" and then they're not stuck at the hospitals for days during a disaster.
What kind of person fakes illness expressly so they don't have to help out during an actual disaster when their skills are needed? "Whenever I hear there's a fire, I tell my firefighter friends to take the battery out of their pager so they won't have to go fight the fire." I agree we owe these people better treatment than just mandating they work heroic hours, but this only makes things worse on those who comply with the mandate.
My neighborhood and community is more important than the hospital; the friends i mentioned specifically are also radio operators, so they have more important things to do during a disaster than be a warm body at not that type of hospital. A sanitarium.
The low-wage workers can get triple-time and take weeks off "later in the year" for covering the stop-loss, so they also benefit.
I don't call fire fighters, because they are emergency responders. Please note i said what i do, not what i think other people should do. The people i tell this to are free to do with that information what they want, i don't demand it or anything.
Consider this a contextual error on my part. It's more of an "inside baseball" snippet of conversation than anything that requires judgement.
That wasn't tree falling in Ohio, that was overloaded line sagged and shorted into a tree, compounded with several other factors that contributed to the grid instability and the inability of the grid operator to realize how unstable the grid was.
I think the point is that neither of those events should take out a whole city; the design is such that there is considerable redundancy in the system.
Indeed. For instance, power grids ideally operate with N-1/N+1 redundancy, i.e., the disablement of any single power line should not cause a cascading failure.
Relying on vegetation management along millions(?) of miles of lines is the definition of thinking you're in control without even knowing what risks exist. I see this every year in Texas, they trim back trees thinking they have solved the problem - except - they are allowed to trim them back I think 6-8 feet from the lines, ignoring the fact the trees are 20-40 feet taller than the lines. Nobody seems to see the risk that they left there but it's quite obvious to me, we're not eliminating risks at all. We're minimizing them at best, and even then the labor required to trim all the branches around lines every year is impossible to keep up with from an economic feasibility standpoint.
They trim back what poses the highest risk with the budget they have.
As you have identified A wider right of way costs more.
Usually for lines above some voltage, perhaps 200kV, the cost of an outage due to a tree strike outweighs the cost of additional vegetation management so they will clear the right of way wide enough that no tree can fall and hit the power line.
Around here for 130kV the right of way is still as narrow as it can be and we annually take down the riskiest trees as this is the best for our budget, which is not unlimited.
Concur, they have huge fire breaks they put high tension lines in, where the easement is easily 100' to either side of the lines. This is in Louisiana. When there's a hurricane these lines still break, but not because of trees. During heavy storms, smaller trees hit smaller (480? Some KV?) Lines that go along highways to residences. A high tension line down means a few days without power (about 3-4), a tree on a lower voltage line is usually fixed within hours.
They go through and remove damaged trees near the easements of the highway lines, as well as branches that could break into lines.
As an aside we lived on the same section of grid as the sheriff, and our power was rock solid for a few years, then he left office and now our power is better than average (at least better than our neighbors who's power line cones from the other direction).
Where I live, there are no trees in the path of high-voltage (400KV) transmission lines. Everything is cleared below them and the voltage lines are about 90-120ft high so even if some trees grow, they will not touch the lines.
I vaguely remember an episode of some thriller series when I was too young to be watching it, perhaps Twilight Zone (or similar) where someone was hearing screaming, they went out a d saw trees being cut.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003