[Outages] Follow-up: Human Error Responsible for Massive Florida Power Outage

[Paul Ferguson]

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Via The Herald Tribune.

[snip]

Florida Power & Light said that a preliminary investigation has found that
human error was responsible for the massive power outage on Tuesday that
affected more than 584,000 customers.

A field engineer was diagnosing a switch that had malfunctioned at FPL?s
Flagami substation in west Miami. Without authorization, the engineer
disabled two levels of relay protection ? something contrary to the Juno
Beach-based company?s procedures.

During the diagnostic process, a fault occurred. With both levels of relay
protection removed, the outage affected 26 transmission lines and 38
substations.

One of the substations served three of the generation units at the
company?s Turkey Point nuclear plant, which was designed to automatically
shut down if there is a lack of enough power. Also affected were two other
generation plants in FPL?s system. The system lost 3,400 megawatts of
generating capacity.

[snip]

More:
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20080229/BREAKING06/231939561

- - ferg

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--
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 fergdawg(at)netzero.net
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/