Message-Id: <l03110704b2a04b873899@[192.174.2.173]>
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1998 10:14:10 -0800
To: pinhole@exploratorium.edu
From: Paul Doherty <pauld@exploratorium.edu>
Subject: Power Outage report
Here is the first report from PGE regarding the outage:
Two interesting excerpts are:
4. When the grounded bus was energized and the protective scheme did not
operate, it took
4/10's of a second to isolate the ground instead of only 1/10th of a
second. That may not sound
like much, but in the world of nanosecond high voltage electrical
flow, that is almost an eternity.
Protective Systems and Generating Plants
5. The rest of the protection system throughout the Bay Area appears
to have worked as it was
designed to. When the fault occurred, 32,000 amps of power were
sucked into the ground lines
like a huge sinkhole of power, as if a major new city suddenly
turned on all its lights and
facilities.
http://www.pge.com/whats_new/news/outage.html