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

["Frank Bulk" <frnkblk () iname com>]

AFAIK, you don't need to have to have someone onsite to trip a breaker....if
it doesn't do it automatically, there are a multitude of SCADA systems
available to manuaully flip them on.  Unless, of course, the
electromechanical components that physically flip the breaker over have
failed.

Frank

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog () merit edu [mailto:owner-nanog () merit edu] On Behalf Of
Michael K. Smith
Sent: Friday, August 04, 2006 12:49 PM
To: Jim Popovitch
Cc: Nanog
Subject: Re: Anyone else lost power at Fisher Plaza this afternoon?


Hello Jim:


On 8/4/06 9:30 AM, "Jim Popovitch" <jimpop () yahoo com> 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