More on Moscow power failure( was RE: Moscow: global power outage)

Michael.Dillon at radianz.com Michael.Dillon at radianz.com
Thu May 26 13:05:58 UTC 2005


Finally, a bit more info found in this Russian
article http://www.comnews.ru/index.cfm?id=15645

According to the director of a well-known but
unnamed Russian telecoms company, there were no
diesel generators at MSK-IX. They had 3 external
power feeds which all failed at once due to the
cascading failure. UPS systems lasted from 
one-half to two hours. He says that they learned
the lesson that they need to build a few
distributed and technically independent exchanges
even in the capital, Moscow.

Some background on the power failure.
It started with a fire in old equipment which caused
a major power station to shed load and shut down
in the middle of the night. As the sun rose and
Moscow's power demands grew, this initiated a 
cascading failure which spread 200 kms south.
However, it did not affect most of the northern
half of the city. It did not affect the military
who switched to their own generators. This is rather
important considering that this "military" is responsible
for roughly half of the serious nuclear weapons arsenal
in the world. The military brought out their portable
generators to support hospitals so it would appear that
all hospitals did not have independent backup power.
In Southern Moscow, much of the cellular telephone
service also failed. In one of the regional towns
a chemical factory released a cloud of nitrogen oxides
which cause the population to panic and begin evacuation
because in that town even the landlines had failed.

After a lot of work, most power stations were back online
this morning. There were only 400 apartment buildings 
with no power compared to thousands yesterday. The damaged
station where the fire occurred is still not functioning
and some backup power generation is still in place. The
metro is running but some suburban electrical train lines
are still shutdown.

All in all, this was a remarkable event. The causes were
identified so quickly. They recovered from the outage so
quickly. The country's major Internet exchange was shown
to be remarkably short-sighted.

--Michael Dillon




More information about the NANOG mailing list