Power outages in SF?

I live in Seattle where just about every power outage is due to a windstorm or ice storm. There was a power outage is SF a few weeks or so ago that affected the grid. Why would SF have a second summer power outage? Curious.

Livejournal is out as well, I think they are in SF.

i think we should make it interesting and ask some conspiracy theorists what happend hehehehe..i mean we may be here for awhile *giggles*

It's a precursor to "the big one", I'll bet. If anyone's there...see if the Embarcadero towers are swaying like drunken sailors.

I haven't heard that rolling black outs are happening and I live in California and it isn't as hot as some other areas of the country so it can't be grid overload. I guess somebody cut a wire somewhere!

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/24/BAG9NR67253.DTL&tsp=1



Mari

Then again.....maybe they got nuked? O.o

Stuff just happens. Animals wander into transformers or something, or some construction company makes a major boo-boo digging up some earth.

I live not far from Seattle, in a suburb near Portland. While a windstorm or icestorm is USUALLY the cause, we lost our power for about 12 hours just this past weekend. I have no idea why.

Those of us who still can't get in -- it's a time for naps, laundry or go wave at the people in your family and see how many remember your name ^_^

Aha, my mom who lives in Berkeley said they had a 4.2 quake near her on Saturday. Could have been a factor.

But..I gotta love that PG&E's own offices went dark, too. *grins*
Even if it is..."the big one".

LL needes to move everytihing to its server farm in Austin, TX, or to somewhere that takes things like power supply seriously.


I love SF, it is incredibly romantic and beautiful and cool. But if you need serious things, like a dependable power supply, you need to get out of California and to somewhere that thinks the fundamentals of life are more important than the superficial conveniences of life.

*votes for every Linden to get up on a bike and pedal to keep the servers running *

Aren't power outages sort of "common" across the US though? I seem to hear it from people regularly.

Which group does SL fall into?

You mean "just about every power outage this winter was due to a windstorm or icestorm"?

I live in Seattle, too, and was living in the U District during the winter when the east side was without power for a couple weeks. We lost power in our area about 4 days after everyone else.

Turns out it was because someone crashed into a telephone pole down the street.

Natural disasters aren't the only thing that cause power outages!

There was a story this winter about a power outage in Alaska that was caused by a bald eagle trying to fly away with a severed DEER HEAD! He lost altitude and crashed into some transformer at a power station and shorted things out.

I guess that IS technically a natural disaster, though...unless the eagle was on Red Bull at the time!

Don't they have tornadoes in TX?

"...takes things like power supply seriously"?? I wonder how much electricity flows through SF vs. the city/town/trailerpark in TX where they have servers?

That doesn't make any sense.

*Seconds Kitty's vote and has a funny visual image of that*

Good one Kitty.

Seems power outages hit major cities mostly...and during times like extreme hot or cold or something, so not surprising that SF had one. NYC used to get hit with them alot.

Here in FL, we get socked during the hurricanes...but we have three major electric companies in my area, depending on county. During the 4 back-to-back hurricanes we had 4 years ago, I had friends and family who lost power anywhere from a day to 2 weeks!!! Where I lived...not even a flicker. Amazing.

Ahhhh, its nice to live in a state where you only have flooding, an occassional tornado, maybe some ice storms in winter. No earthquakes

But then- I'm also in a Valley, living on a hill, so I dont even have worries of Tornados or floods.

HEY LL!! Move the server farm next to my house!!!

Pennsylvania state & county Goverment will most likely fork over a couple million $$ for any company that moves in.

Don't know anyone in Austin, but am acquainted with several people in Texas. Parts of Texas do have problems when they get 17 inches of rain in 24 hours, like happened the ohter day. But otherwise, Hey! They keep the lights on!

Ok, I will just get on my bike and make a flying visit to the Roswell 9/11 Grassy Knoll Institute and see what they have to say. If I'm not back in 24 hours, send a search party as I may have been abducted by aliens...

(Ye gods - see what a lack of SL is doing to my brain?) *rofl*

Do the Lindens not have backup generators and other redundancies in place to handle periodic localized outages, especially in a place like San Francisco???? From the sound of their postings, it seems that the power may be back on at this time but they are having problems getting the grid back online in a stable fashion.

And yes, they had some power problems with their Austin facilities fairly recently.

Thirds Kitty Barnett's vote.

coco

From an article linked to in Slashdot headline...

"365 Main, a datacenter on the edge of San Francisco's Financial District, is popular with Soma startups for its proximity and its state-of-the-art facilities. Or it used to be, anyway, until a power outage took down sites including Craigslist, Six Apart's TypePad and LiveJournal blogging sites, local listings site Yelp, and blog search engine Technorati. The cause? You won't believe it.

A source close to the company says:

Someone came in shitfaced drunk, got angry, went berserk, and fucked up a lot of stuff. There's an outage on 40 or so racks at minimum."

I appreciate this down time so much more now!!

Topics:Internet
CompaniesG and E Corp
By Reuters | 24 Jul 2007 | 07:30 PM ET
Font size:
Sporadic power outages cascaded across San Francisco on Tuesday afternoon, affecting widespread areas throughout the city, including the downtown financial district, and halting its famous cable cars on the city's steep hills.

About 51,000 electricity customers in San Francisco and an area south of the city were in the dark, but power was being restored by late afternoon, said Darlene Chiu, spokeswoman for Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the main utility for the city.

Chiu said the breakdown was triggered by a fault in PG&E's underground electric system but the utility did not know what caused the problem and it was investigating, she said.

Local radio station KCBS said the outages may been set off by an explosion in an underground electric fault on a downtown street.

More than 30,000 customers had electric service restored and all customers were expected to get their lights back on by about 4 p.m. PDT, two hours after the outages began.

Bay Area Rapid Transit commuter trains were moving, although some of the lights in underground stations were off, a BART spokesman told local radio.

In addition to the cable cars, some city bus services were disrupted in the North Beach and Chinatown tourist neighborhoods and downtown due to the failure of overhead power lines, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Municipal Railway said.

The power outage could also be responsible for shutting down some of the Internet's major players. Several prominent websites including Craigslist, CNet, Technorati, Yelp and Red Envelope.

San Francisco-based classified site Craigslist was also down Tuesday afternoon, but founder Craig Newmark said he didn't know why. "Craigslist and many other sites are having issues at the colo facility. Please sit tight, and try again later. We are aware of the situation, and the happy craigslist elves are scurrying to make it better, even now," said an error message on the site's homepage.

Pacific Gas & Electric is owned by PG&E Corp.

[PCG 44.63 -1.82 (-3.92%) ].

People are molving away from California - 'nuff said.

Dell is in Austin, Texas Instruments is everywhere in Texas, NCSoft is in Austin, ID is in Dallas


Here is more:
http://austin.about.com/cs/hightech/a/hightech_jobs.htm


Might want to try doing some research before throwing around the trailerpark comment.


And yes, we have tornadoes in Texas. California has earthquakes. You did have a point somewhere in there right?