|
North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical POWER: CORRECTION: San Mateo/San Francisco Power
Some corrections: Official Start time: 8:17AM Pacific Standard Time Official End time: 3:52PM Pacific Standard Time Root cause, failure by a work crew to *UN*ground two safety ground straps after completing work on the 115Kvolt line at the San Mateo Coyote Point substation. 1 Fatality, a women struck at an intersection with non-functioning traffic signals. San Francisco has two subway systems. BART was able to move their trains to the next station, reportedly in some cases after a 1-2 hour delay. MUNI evacuated people on foot through the tunnels. San Francisco International Airport had emergency power for runway lights and navagation, and did land planes during the outage. The jetways, baggage conveyers, security checkpoints, ticketing systems, etc did not have power. Because the airport can't handle large numbers of passengers without power other flights were delayed, cancelled or diverted to other airports. Effect on Major/Minor Internet providers. A number of people wrote in saying that provider XYZ had problems. There may not have been any 'major' problems with 'major' providers, there were some minor/major problems with major/minor providers. How individual customers were affected varied, mostly depending on the customers' own backup planning. Generally the Customer Premise Equipment lost power (or backup power) before the ISP's equipment went down. Telephone calling volume was up 43% in the Bay area. This may have lead to a higher number of ISP/busy/no connection problems with dialup access. The most common reported problem was with webserver farms only having limited backup battery. I also received a report of a provider's customer service PBX system battery failing, so their phones gave ring-no answer. Providers generally gave priority to routers and access servers over web and mail servers. You could often use the Internet, but your mail or web page may have been unavailable. E-Mail is automatically queued for 2-4 days, so very few e-mail messages should have been lost, only delayed a few hours. When evaluating how your provider did, ask where their POP is and if it lost utlity power. I've noticed some provider sales people already enaging in some competitor bashing, saying they stayed up while provider X didn't. However in some cases, it was because they were located in a different area and never lost utility power. Effects on other industries. Banks may have a lot of backup systems to protect them, but their customer access systems appear less reliable. 600 ATM machines, and 200 bank branches in the area were shutdown due to the power outage. One person noted that Nordstroms, long noted for their customer service, remained open throughout the power outage. At other stores, clerks couldn't make sales without computer price lookup and approval, especially for 'sale' items. VISA/Mastercard say their credit card approval systems remained operational, but some store's inhouse PBX and Verifone terminals didn't have battery backup. Some grocery stores shutdown, others implemented an "honor" system where people used pencil and paper to write the prices off the shelf tags, since the UPC laser scanners require power. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation
|