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Re: Anyone else lost power at Fisher Plaza this afternoon?

  • From: Michael K. Smith
  • Date: Fri Aug 04 12:55:48 2006

Hello Jim:


On 8/4/06 9:30 AM, "Jim Popovitch" <[email protected]> wrote:

> 
> Michael K. Smith wrote:
>> It was a breaker in the main bypass from city power to the generators.  The
>> breaker failed to close so the generators happily fed power to nowhere.
>> Then, everyone's UPS failed and down we/they went.  The outage lasted
>> approximately 26 minutes.
> 
> Nobody checked to make sure that at least one of the UPSs showed a
> status of "ONLINE" instead of "ONBATTERY"?   Were there no UPSs
> configured to alert during continued and extended PF?  Surely people
> didn't just trust the sound/vibration of the running generator.
> 
> -Jim P.

Indeed.  The problem was there wasn't an engineer on site who could manually
trip the breaker.  They got onsite pretty quickly, but not quickly enough to
trip the breaker in time to avoid an outage.  So we watched the UPS drain
all the way down which took about 24 minutes in our case.  So close, yet so
far.

Regards,

Mike