June 14, 2000

7:16 PM

POWER ALERT: SF and SJ, CA.
If you, or your website, are located in the *other* bay area :-), you might want to know that The California ISO (the people who run the grid) have declared a power emergency and the City of Palo Alto Utilities, among others, has implemented rolling blackouts.

Again, if you host in this area, this may result in intermittent outages to your site; you might wish to post a notice to that effect, so that regular visitors don't get worried.
posted by baylink (8 comments total)

Actually Exodus has enormous diesel generators, so most bay area sites (like yahoo, etc.) should be fine.
posted by mathowie at 8:34 PM on June 14, 2000

thats the cool thing. its a new invention called "back up generators".
posted by sikk at 10:52 PM on June 14, 2000

Up in Portland, where I grew up, the backup generators were gas turbines powered by methane -- essentially, jet engines.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 11:48 PM on June 14, 2000

heh. sucks to the peoples in the bay area.
posted by y0bhgu0d at 8:44 AM on June 15, 2000

Never mind my web site -- I'd be ticked if my electric company simply decided that I could do without power from 2:10 to 4:10 p.m. Something is very wrong with this solution.
posted by werty at 10:55 AM on June 15, 2000

Sounds like life in the Pocono Mountains... we lose power in every storm, a car hits a pole, or a deer looks at the power lines the wrong way... you learn to press the "save" button for your work on a regular basis.

No wonder why the Amish chose to live here.
posted by EricBrooksDotCom at 11:24 AM on June 15, 2000

Yes, but as regular readers of Risks Digest may attest, it's no good to have backup generators if you don't test the failover.

Chicagoland power supplier ComEd was severely stressed the last couple of years, and last year implemented a "rolling blackout" policy that was vague, full of holes, pretty much eliminated any chance of public officials getting notified, and so on. There was a hue and cry but nothing really changed except ComEd's "public posture". The pièce de résistance was a blackout right in the Loop, taking out 40-story skyscrapers (e.g. mine). By coincidence I arrived just as they were evacuating people out the stairs. ComEd fired a bunch of people and promised infrastructure improvements. (Among other things, by the end of last year they finally got all their nuke plants off the NRC's watch list.) We still haven't had a real heat wave this year, though.
posted by dhartung at 12:45 AM on June 16, 2000

Whoops. I forgot the Risks Digest url in the above. (Sorry Lindsay.)
posted by dhartung at 12:46 AM on June 16, 2000