SAR-EMT40
Well-known member
This isn’t a rant but something that I find very interesting and hope maybe some others may find interesting also. There actually is a point. 
NA blackout of 1965 Map
The cause of the failure was human error that happened days before the blackout, when maintenance personnel incorrectly set a protective relay on one of the transmission lines between the Niagara generating station Sir Adam Beck Station No. 2 in Queenston, Ontario and Southern Ontario. Instead of the relay being set to trip and protect the line if the flow of power exceeded the line's capacity, it was set for a much lower value.
As was common on a cold November evening, power for heating, lighting and cooking was pushing the electrical system to near its peak capacity, and the transmission lines heading into Southern Ontario were heavily loaded. At 5:16 p.m. Eastern Time a small surge of power coming from Lewiston, New York's Robert Moses generating plant caused the mis-set relay to trip at far below the line's rated capacity, disabling a main power line heading into Southern Ontario. Within seconds, the power that was flowing on the tripped line transferred to the other lines, causing them to become overloaded. Their protective relays, which are designed to protect the line if it became overloaded, tripped, isolating Adam Beck from all of Southern Ontario.
With no place else to go, the excess power from Beck then switched direction and headed east over the interconnected lines into New York State, overloading them as well and isolating the power generated in the Niagara region from the rest of the interconnected grid. The Beck and Moses generators, with no outlet for their power, were automatically shut down to prevent damage. Within five minutes the power distribution system in the northeast was in chaos as the effects of overloads and loss of generating capacity cascaded through the network, breaking it up into "islands". Plant after plant experienced load imbalances and automatically shut down. The affected power areas were the Ontario Hydro System, St Lawrence-Oswego, Western New York and Eastern New York-New England. Maine, with only limited electrical connection southwards, was not affected. The only part of the Ontario Hydro System not affected was the Fort Erie area next to Buffalo which was still powered by the old 25 Hz generators. Residents in Fort Erie were able to pick up a TV broadcast from New York where a local backup generator was being used for transmission purposes.”
The parts of the story that really fascinate me is not just the cause which is interesting but also the way people reacted. They all stayed put. The sat in the subways, some for 12 hours. Same with the elevators. It is our reaction to technology failing that really interests me. People couldn’t go to the bathroom, they were extremely uncomfortable because of the stale air and cold and couldn’t get water or food, but everyone was told what they were always told. Stay put, the power will be on in a couple of minutes. We are taught to rely on technology and it is expected and their experience told them that it would be on in a few minutes so they did what they were told. They overrode even the most basic human needs of food, water and comfort their belief was so strong.
But why bring this up? Well, I have another question. Do you know were you where 8/22/99?
I do. What is interesting isn’t what I was doing but why I remember what I was doing. I was in the northwest corner of CT between Bear mountain and Mt. Frissel. Now this was not critical navigation but more playing with my toy that I had been using for several years at that point. I pulled my shiny GPS out and nothing worked. Didn’t have a clue where it was. But how is it possible that billions of dollars of space based atomic clocks and all this technology could have stopped working? Well the real story is interesting only because it shows how complicated some of our technology has become. For people who program they understand that 1024 is a magic number. Back in the ‘70s when the GPS systems were actually designed memory was at a premium and programmers learned lots of creative ways to “shave bits” as it was called. One of the things they did was to only use enough bits to indentify 1024 weeks of the almanac information. That’s about 20 years which everyone knows is well past the useful life spans of computer stuff so everyone felt pretty safe with this. So we fast forward 1024 weeks to, you got it August 22nd 1999 and the firmware in my handheld GPS wasn’t ready for week 1024 and modulo math brings it back to week 0 (zero) which was January 6, 1980 for most systems. Now, for those that don’t know. A GPS only knows where it is because it knows what satellites are overhead. It only knows what satellites’ are overhead because it knows where in general it is in the world (or does an elaborate search of all possible satellites) and the date and time. Since it knows the orbits of the satellites it knows who is overhead to listen too. Mess with the GPS’s date and time and it doesn’t know where the satellites are because the ephemeris data doesn’t match up with any of the satellite orbits. That results in staring at a very shiny, expensive and clunky paper weight or a very large fishing lure.
There use to be many reasons to not fully trust that the data from GPS satellites was always going to be there. The reasons are fewer now but still relying on a high tech gadget that can have so much go wrong, even things that the experts didn’t consider could be dicey and I always like to have more than one option.
When I teach navigation classes and especially the introduction classes I teach on GPS the first things that I go over with students are the pages that reflect first, what the health and strength of reception of the satellites is and if it even exists. Next is the EPA or estimated positional accuracy. Knowing that my students are sending a waypoint for a search location to the base and that it has a positional estimated accuracy of 8 meters is considerably different than an EPA of 360 feet. They need to know useful from hurtful information. Searching for something in an area and assuming 20 foot accuracy is counterproductive to the effort when the actual EPA was 360 feet.
I also don’t teach staring at the compass page while walking. I usually have my students identify the location and the bearing and distance to the waypoint letting the GPS calculate that and then use their compass skills to walk the bearing and pace the distance. That allows the GPS to be the check for navigation and their compass skills to improve so that they are always comfortable with their "backup system".
The point was that some of these technologies are built on a house of cards. The blackout was caused by a simple trip breaker set incorrectly to a value actually less than it was capable of carrying. The other was an engineering design tradeoff decision that even though they knew about wasn't able to be universally corrected in time.
Just my $.02 with a little history,
Keith
NA blackout of 1965 Map
The cause of the failure was human error that happened days before the blackout, when maintenance personnel incorrectly set a protective relay on one of the transmission lines between the Niagara generating station Sir Adam Beck Station No. 2 in Queenston, Ontario and Southern Ontario. Instead of the relay being set to trip and protect the line if the flow of power exceeded the line's capacity, it was set for a much lower value.
As was common on a cold November evening, power for heating, lighting and cooking was pushing the electrical system to near its peak capacity, and the transmission lines heading into Southern Ontario were heavily loaded. At 5:16 p.m. Eastern Time a small surge of power coming from Lewiston, New York's Robert Moses generating plant caused the mis-set relay to trip at far below the line's rated capacity, disabling a main power line heading into Southern Ontario. Within seconds, the power that was flowing on the tripped line transferred to the other lines, causing them to become overloaded. Their protective relays, which are designed to protect the line if it became overloaded, tripped, isolating Adam Beck from all of Southern Ontario.
With no place else to go, the excess power from Beck then switched direction and headed east over the interconnected lines into New York State, overloading them as well and isolating the power generated in the Niagara region from the rest of the interconnected grid. The Beck and Moses generators, with no outlet for their power, were automatically shut down to prevent damage. Within five minutes the power distribution system in the northeast was in chaos as the effects of overloads and loss of generating capacity cascaded through the network, breaking it up into "islands". Plant after plant experienced load imbalances and automatically shut down. The affected power areas were the Ontario Hydro System, St Lawrence-Oswego, Western New York and Eastern New York-New England. Maine, with only limited electrical connection southwards, was not affected. The only part of the Ontario Hydro System not affected was the Fort Erie area next to Buffalo which was still powered by the old 25 Hz generators. Residents in Fort Erie were able to pick up a TV broadcast from New York where a local backup generator was being used for transmission purposes.”
The parts of the story that really fascinate me is not just the cause which is interesting but also the way people reacted. They all stayed put. The sat in the subways, some for 12 hours. Same with the elevators. It is our reaction to technology failing that really interests me. People couldn’t go to the bathroom, they were extremely uncomfortable because of the stale air and cold and couldn’t get water or food, but everyone was told what they were always told. Stay put, the power will be on in a couple of minutes. We are taught to rely on technology and it is expected and their experience told them that it would be on in a few minutes so they did what they were told. They overrode even the most basic human needs of food, water and comfort their belief was so strong.
But why bring this up? Well, I have another question. Do you know were you where 8/22/99?
I do. What is interesting isn’t what I was doing but why I remember what I was doing. I was in the northwest corner of CT between Bear mountain and Mt. Frissel. Now this was not critical navigation but more playing with my toy that I had been using for several years at that point. I pulled my shiny GPS out and nothing worked. Didn’t have a clue where it was. But how is it possible that billions of dollars of space based atomic clocks and all this technology could have stopped working? Well the real story is interesting only because it shows how complicated some of our technology has become. For people who program they understand that 1024 is a magic number. Back in the ‘70s when the GPS systems were actually designed memory was at a premium and programmers learned lots of creative ways to “shave bits” as it was called. One of the things they did was to only use enough bits to indentify 1024 weeks of the almanac information. That’s about 20 years which everyone knows is well past the useful life spans of computer stuff so everyone felt pretty safe with this. So we fast forward 1024 weeks to, you got it August 22nd 1999 and the firmware in my handheld GPS wasn’t ready for week 1024 and modulo math brings it back to week 0 (zero) which was January 6, 1980 for most systems. Now, for those that don’t know. A GPS only knows where it is because it knows what satellites are overhead. It only knows what satellites’ are overhead because it knows where in general it is in the world (or does an elaborate search of all possible satellites) and the date and time. Since it knows the orbits of the satellites it knows who is overhead to listen too. Mess with the GPS’s date and time and it doesn’t know where the satellites are because the ephemeris data doesn’t match up with any of the satellite orbits. That results in staring at a very shiny, expensive and clunky paper weight or a very large fishing lure.
There use to be many reasons to not fully trust that the data from GPS satellites was always going to be there. The reasons are fewer now but still relying on a high tech gadget that can have so much go wrong, even things that the experts didn’t consider could be dicey and I always like to have more than one option.
When I teach navigation classes and especially the introduction classes I teach on GPS the first things that I go over with students are the pages that reflect first, what the health and strength of reception of the satellites is and if it even exists. Next is the EPA or estimated positional accuracy. Knowing that my students are sending a waypoint for a search location to the base and that it has a positional estimated accuracy of 8 meters is considerably different than an EPA of 360 feet. They need to know useful from hurtful information. Searching for something in an area and assuming 20 foot accuracy is counterproductive to the effort when the actual EPA was 360 feet.
I also don’t teach staring at the compass page while walking. I usually have my students identify the location and the bearing and distance to the waypoint letting the GPS calculate that and then use their compass skills to walk the bearing and pace the distance. That allows the GPS to be the check for navigation and their compass skills to improve so that they are always comfortable with their "backup system".
The point was that some of these technologies are built on a house of cards. The blackout was caused by a simple trip breaker set incorrectly to a value actually less than it was capable of carrying. The other was an engineering design tradeoff decision that even though they knew about wasn't able to be universally corrected in time.
Just my $.02 with a little history,
Keith
