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Post by PlanZ on Sept 28, 2016 22:15:17 GMT 10
How interesting is this (in a bad way if it's happening to you): www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-28/sa-weather-south-australia-without-power-as-storm-hits/7885930some interesting issues: SA Water said it had lost power to some of its pumping stations which was affecting its ability to deliver water and remove sewage to some customers. Telstra's SA general manager said mobile phone users should prepare for a loss of network coverage as towers and exchanges ran out of back-up power. Optus and some Vodafone networks are also down across the state. 'The system has behaved as it's meant to behave to protect the national energy market," Mr Weatherill said. ie damage is no longer limited by locality. We're all connected and the whole house of cards can collapse. Incredible. Double down on the prepping! |
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shinester
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Post by shinester on Sept 29, 2016 10:36:20 GMT 10
*rolls eyes*
I'm pretty sure your being an 'essential service' such that loosing water and phones [how do you call for an emergency service without them] is a much higher priority than protecting the national energy market whatever that means.
We all know that relying on the government isn't a good plan.
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blueshoes
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Post by blueshoes on Sept 29, 2016 10:48:20 GMT 10
I am in Adelaide and living through this. It seems last night's blackout ended up only being 4-6 hours by the time the gas power plant at Pt Augusta could kick in and pickbup the slack, but I learned a lot!: If you're here too please chip in your thoughts. Here's what I learnt in case it helps anyone else: Our cell towers and water pumping seem to have a 4ish hour power backup. This meant we were all on twitter and FB for those 4hrs complaining and trying to get updates. Even though there were warnings earlier in the day to keep your phone fully charged, lots of people didn't. Im also amazed at the number of people having chips and chocolate and melting ice cream for dinner because they only had electric cooking equipment. Hospitals had generators, but still there was at least one ICCU that lost power (Flinders). I nearly needed emergency rehydration (thanks to gastro) and wasn't sure what to do other than drink as much as i could - i don't know how bad the EDs got but they are busy at the best of times No electricity meant no petrol pumps, so you had what you had. This reportedly also affected the RAA and ambulances, who only had what was in their tanks. Things i did right: - Having a plan and having thought stuff through made the whole thing less stressful. -light: i have a stash of candles and I got out the torches and batteries and put them where we could all find them. On twitter there were jokes about houses smelling weird as multiple scented candles are burned together... lol but a good size stash of the right size batteries was better because i could use a torch as a nightlight for the kids - Water: we filled up the bath so we could flush the loo if water pumping failed, had drinking water on hand. Our 'gotcha' was the bathroom door then not shutting properly enough to keep the 1yo away from trying to climb in the full bath - we worked it out but is worth thinking about - food: I already keep a decent supply of non perishables on hand because i only aim to shop every week or two. Much less stressful than worrying about needing to go to the shops under bad conditions -cooking: even a basic camp stove (and I'd just stocked up on extra metho) meant we could have hot drinks to warm up, it made a good difference Stuff i realised/ would change: -having stuff everywhere (kids toys etc) makes it hard to move around in low light, e.g. just a torch/candle. I need to think about ways to restrict toys to a given area - because the blackout started in the afternoon I could wash up our backlog of dishes while we still had hot pressurized water. If it had started at night snd lasted a few days it would hafe been much more painful to deal with... note to self, work on keeping on top of dishes - I really wished I had a battery operated CB radio to stay connected past cell tower failure at 4hrs - I realised i have no idea how to wash clothes without our electronic machine. Hmmm... - it occurred to me we keep very little cash on hand - if EFTPOS died (as it almost did) and we needed to try and buy a bottle of fuel or something we would be sunk. On the upside, there were lots of funny comments on Twitter  |
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Post by ziggysdad on Sept 29, 2016 11:35:15 GMT 10
^^^Consider stocking rehydration salts for adults and Gastrolyte for little kids (young kids can become severely dehydrated in under a day due to severe gastro). Alternatively, you can mix up your own rehydration solution using water, sugar and salt. I stock Gatorade as well.
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Post by graynomad on Sept 29, 2016 12:34:05 GMT 10
So essentially the entire state was blacked out because of a single tower, now there's a robust system.
Not that I blame the system as such because to get really good reliability you need redundancy and I doubt that anybody wants to pay for TWO power grids.
But it just goes to show how fragile the modern world is.
Personally, if my setup was in SA it would have made no difference at all to my daily life, in fact I wouldn't know something had happened until I saw it on the news.
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paranoia
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Post by paranoia on Sept 29, 2016 13:09:28 GMT 10
After all the huff and puff the news, government and general public made of this event you'd think the sky was falling. I know one of our main backup generators was out as they're in the middle of a 3 week shutdown at the moment (I know some of the people working there). We had no power for nearly 6 hours that is all. What this event really taught me is just how much the general public panic when they cant just drive to the next town over who still have power and get take away. If this had lasted a day or two... Maybe a week, I hate to think what would have happened to some people emotionally. I got out the blackout kit, cooked up pasta for tea from pantry foods on butane stoves (no opening the fridge during blackouts rule)... Kids spent the evening reading books and doing school workbooks. Best thing to come out of the evening for me was I had a really good conversation with my wife about all the things that were down. Explained a few of my preps she was yet to be aware of and made some really good progress with her Long story short; Don't panic and always know where your towel is... |
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blueshoes
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Post by blueshoes on Sept 29, 2016 13:32:40 GMT 10
After all the huff and puff the news, government and general public made of this event you'd think the sky was falling. I know one of our main backup generators was out as they're in the middle of a 3 week shutdown at the moment (I know some of the people working there). We had no power for nearly 6 hours that is all. What this event really taught me is just how much the general public panic when they cant just drive to the next town over who still have power and get take away. If this had lasted a day or two... Maybe a week, I hate to think what would have happened to some people emotionally. This! It wasn't even a proper cyclone and the TV and radio have been going on about a state of emergency blah blah... It amazed me how many people weren't (aren't?) even prepared for a short blackout. What are they going to be eating tonight if power goes down again? I think it would have been much less stressful without all the hype, but I suspect it's hard to get people's attention if you don't throw out panic lines like "worst storm in 70 years" and "cyclonic conditions" and "activate extended blackout plans" (not that most people had any, lol) |
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paranoia
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Post by paranoia on Sept 29, 2016 13:43:30 GMT 10
Almost as though they want people to panic?... Hmmm... I'll leave it at that so people dont start trying to take away my tin foil hat. Another big bonus is my wife had been questioning why I needed to get my HAM radio licence this coming weekend. Having all the cell towers down got her over the line |
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Post by PlanZ on Sept 29, 2016 14:11:12 GMT 10
Granted, if you look at this from the perspective of people being without power for six hours then perhaps it's not that big a deal. Power outages happen.
But the critical factors that make this a very significant incident are:
a) A few faults brought the whole system down. This is a fairly new phenomena. This incident is the 'canary in the coal mine' IMO.
b) it revealed the design flaws and inadequate redundancies in a whole bunch of systems (water supply, mobile networks, petrol supply etc).
Again, no major harm done as it was only six hours. But the disturbing thing is how quickly systems starting showing failures.
c) The fact that people are so disrupted by a reasonably short power outage is it self cause for concern.
d) lastly, although six hours may seem very short to most people, it is absolutely long enough to cause harm or even death in today's society.
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paranoia
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Post by paranoia on Sept 29, 2016 14:23:10 GMT 10
All systems can and will fail, its surprising to me this doesnt happen more often.
Interesting that everyone seems to blame/look to the government in times like this when both the power network and comms network are privately owned and managed systems.
If you go back a couple years SA power networks were being blamed for 'over engineering and 'over developing' south australias line infrastructure, costing us too much money.
A lot of these issues stem from people believing you can build somthing that cant fail and building their lives around this fact.
You're very right in saying the disruption this caused being a concern in itself. To me this is probably the bigger issue.
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shinester
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Post by shinester on Sept 29, 2016 18:11:40 GMT 10
I am in Adelaide and living through this. It seems last night's blackout ended up only being 4-6 hours by the time the gas power plant at Pt Augusta could kick in and pickbup the slack, but I learned a lot!: If you're here too please chip in your thoughts. Here's what I learnt in case it helps anyone else: Our cell towers and water pumping seem to have a 4ish hour power backup. This meant we were all on twitter and FB for those 4hrs complaining and trying to get updates. Even though there were warnings earlier in the day to keep your phone fully charged, lots of people didn't. Im also amazed at the number of people having chips and chocolate and melting ice cream for dinner because they only had electric cooking equipment. Hospitals had generators, but still there was at least one ICCU that lost power (Flinders). I nearly needed emergency rehydration (thanks to gastro) and wasn't sure what to do other than drink as much as i could - i don't know how bad the EDs got but they are busy at the best of times No electricity meant no petrol pumps, so you had what you had. This reportedly also affected the RAA and ambulances, who only had what was in their tanks. Things i did right: - Having a plan and having thought stuff through made the whole thing less stressful. -light: i have a stash of candles and I got out the torches and batteries and put them where we could all find them. On twitter there were jokes about houses smelling weird as multiple scented candles are burned together... lol but a good size stash of the right size batteries was better because i could use a torch as a nightlight for the kids - Water: we filled up the bath so we could flush the loo if water pumping failed, had drinking water on hand. Our 'gotcha' was the bathroom door then not shutting properly enough to keep the 1yo away from trying to climb in the full bath - we worked it out but is worth thinking about - food: I already keep a decent supply of non perishables on hand because i only aim to shop every week or two. Much less stressful than worrying about needing to go to the shops under bad conditions -cooking: even a basic camp stove (and I'd just stocked up on extra metho) meant we could have hot drinks to warm up, it made a good difference Stuff i realised/ would change: -having stuff everywhere (kids toys etc) makes it hard to move around in low light, e.g. just a torch/candle. I need to think about ways to restrict toys to a given area - because the blackout started in the afternoon I could wash up our backlog of dishes while we still had hot pressurized water. If it had started at night snd lasted a few days it would hafe been much more painful to deal with... note to self, work on keeping on top of dishes - I really wished I had a battery operated CB radio to stay connected past cell tower failure at 4hrs - I realised i have no idea how to wash clothes without our electronic machine. Hmmm... - it occurred to me we keep very little cash on hand - if EFTPOS died (as it almost did) and we needed to try and buy a bottle of fuel or something we would be sunk. On the upside, there were lots of funny comments on Twitter Thanks for the excellent report, it's quite helpful and I would imagine that it's close to the reality across the country. - Gastro - hydro, indeed as you said, try your best. Ideally IVs are the go for people in strife, though you and I can't buy them, though there's another way to rehydrate, Proctoclysis a nice way of saying rectal rehydration, nope I'm not making that up. See HERE - People being unprepared, I'm not amazing or surprised at all. I'm somewhat surprised by the lack of backup for essential services. - Your hot water tank can also be used as drinking water, depending on the situation may be more important than dish washing. - You can pick up a handheld Baofeng CB for $20-50. Typically they need to be programmed for AUS that can be done with a cable or manually. The higher than antenna the longer the range as it's line of sight. - the hand camping washing machines aren't great, though better than doing it by hand in a bath or sink. I have a small lower powered washing machine, though I have a decent reserve in the battery bank and I could do many loads with the normal one assuming I have water to spare. Other ideas. - The cheap easy way for some backup power is to get a computer UPS, used examples with ok batteries turn up all of the time for about $50 if you're a little patient. More than happy to examine any Ebay ones for you and explain the specs, just PM me. They have limited battery storage [varies] but they will keep an energy saver bulb in any lamp on for a good amount of time and other small appliances [charge your phone]. You also don't have to remember to charge them like a battery bank because you keep them hooked up. I do have 4 independent systems with varying capacities... almost over kill. - I grabbed a rechargeable work light, super bright, great for all manner of emergency activities or power outages. - We recently talked about hooking up an on demand pump to your normal mains water, assuming you have a tank to supply it. |
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Post by Deleted on Sept 29, 2016 19:11:48 GMT 10
*rolls eyes* I'm pretty sure your being an 'essential service' such that loosing water and phones [how do you call for an emergency service without them] is a much higher priority than protecting the national energy market whatever that means. We all know that relying on the government isn't a good plan. Essentially means that the interconnected grid isolated itself from SA where the fault was. This is to protect the grid infrastructure and keep the rest of the system energised. If the protection systems did not shut off the SA connection the the fault would have caused trips further up the system and would have affected more than just SA. Protection systems are designed to contain a fault to the affected system, unfortunately when the affected system is one of you main power lines you dont have much option other than to get out the candles. Approx 20 years ago WA had major blackout when the transmission line from Perth to Kalgoorlie blew down, resulting in almost complete shutdown of the WA power grid. Some homes were still without power a week later. Personally I believe a failure of the energy infrastructure (either natural cause or deliberate) is the most likely short-medium term SHTF situation I am likely to face. Particularly here in WA. I work in the power gen industry and having an understanding of how it works also means I understand some of the vulnerabilities. This latest event in SA is a timely reminder to myself as to why I want to be better prepared. I started off all eager several months ago and got my initial target of 1 month worth of supplies sorted but have been slack on building on that. So now I am renewing my efforts to get my 3 months supplies completed. |
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shinester
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Post by shinester on Sept 30, 2016 11:56:53 GMT 10
Good one bro and thanks for the extra info on how the infrastructure is set up. My position was indeed that as an essential service to which some people can die in which it can [and does] create panic in people and I'm questioning why the system was so vulnerable and had so little redundancy.
I had some personal experience with a week of interrupted and intermittent power with some works going on and we even had power leads to a generator for our power for about a week. It's one of the main reasons I have a backup power source and limited generation. It's not life threatening for myself, though it sure effects lifestyle and my job requires I have at least a laptop and internet connection. It's why I chose to have a Uninterrupted power supplies as part of my preps for it's more likely that these things occur than it is for a SHTF event.
It does happen, though obviously it's infrequent.
In terms of reminders, ha... it's always good to have them. Committing to the plan is the key and if I were doing it all again, my first month would be all in canned food that i get on special and even then it's 10 times the price of rice/kg. The main reasons, it lasts doesn't require cooking,
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blueshoes
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Post by blueshoes on Sept 30, 2016 14:40:09 GMT 10
Good one bro and thanks for the extra info on how the infrastructure is set up. My position was indeed that as an essential service to which some people can die in which it can [and does] create panic in people and I'm questioning why the system was so vulnerable and had so little redundancy. I had some personal experience with a week of interrupted and intermittent power... It's why I chose to have a Uninterrupted power supplies as part of my preps for it's more likely that these things occur than it is for a SHTF event.
It does happen, though obviously it's infrequent.
In terms of reminders, ha... it's always good to have them. Committing to the plan is the key and if I were doing it all again, my first month would be all in canned food that i get on special and even then it's 10 times the price of rice/kg. The main reasons, it lasts doesn't require cooking,
There's nothing like personal experience eh. Funny you mention the Longford explosion. I grew up in Vic and lived through those two weeks (ish) with no gas - in a house with gas heating, gas stove/oven, and gas hot water. It was ... memorable, to say the least. Yay for the electric jug and microwave! Maybe that's why I have never been able to really trust infrastructure!! Now I have no chance of trusting everything lol And I agree, more info on how everything is set up is interesting |
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ygidorp
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Post by ygidorp on Sept 30, 2016 16:48:20 GMT 10
Also in SA, similar experience to twooldblueshoes - Having 80L of stored water, and a backup filtration system and nearby river, added greatly to my peace of mind. Definitely want to accelerate installation of rainwater tank by early next year. - Despite having some candles (mostly scented, requisitioned from the wife), and a kerosene lamp, battery lamps are invaluable. Remember if there's any fires, you can't call emergency services. So battery powered lamps are preferable for short term outages. I need to upgrade to a larger lantern. - Cheap, small hand torches rule. You can have them everywhere. - Full pantry - check. Backup non-perishable fixed stores stashed away in separate hidden location - check. - Gas mains still worked, so we had hot food. In the event they went out, I had some solace in knowing we had a gas BBQ and fire starting tools. - Very glad to have blackout curtains to maintain opsec. Funnily enough, fully agree on the following: - Keeping the house cleaner. Baby toys underfoot was a major pain. - We were fortunate and had just finished a dishwashing cycle when power was cut. Maybe keep a larger stockpile of paper plates for short term outages?  - CB radio would have been a nice luxury to keep in contact with family nearby in the metro area. - Limited cash on hand. On a scarier note, I have heard from friends who work at the RAH that some hospitals had to resuscitate people in the ICU manually. Not cool. |
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australia
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Post by australia on Sept 30, 2016 20:20:55 GMT 10
Secret pic...Showing a control computer showing the 0 load in SA from the link . Direct Lighting strikes on assets and a few towers were downed according to reports . Pic mainly shows the 0 power from the interstate link (sa on the left)  |
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