WEATHER: rolling blackouts along the East Coast

Wed Jul 7 13:59:19 UTC 1999

Unnamed Administration sources reported that Nathan Stratton said:

[peak shortages]
> Wow, I find that hard to beleave. I have lived in many areas of the world
> and they all have problems with the summer load, just as many gas
> companies do with the winter load. The utilities including telephone don't
> engineer their networks for the highest possible load, they try to get as
> close as they can. Telephone networks have blocking probabilities, power
> networks have load factors, etc. 

Recall that a major telco failure was caused by peak loads.

ATT in NYC had a contract w/Con Ed [?that's the NYC utility, ISTM]
for peak shedding. Such means ATT gets a big break on their bill.

So when given the word, ATT went to Plan B, starting their
engine-gen's to run things. The switches never saw THAT as they
run off of -48v... But the chargers for the string did, & tripped
off.

By the time Clue arrived; it was too late.

One consquence of that was very long term. The FAA had wanted to
buy diversity by getting some service from multiple carriers, but
GSA refused as it would crack open the FTS-2000 contract. [FTS-2k
went to 2 carriers; with half the USG agencies going to ATT and
the other to MCI or Sprint, I can never recall which.] 

After JFK, LGA, and the ARTCC on Long Island all went silent,
with ripple effect extending from Europe to LA.....GSA relented.

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