san diego black out

Thursday's massive power outage across parts of Arizona and southern California serves as another reminder of the vulnerabilities in the nation's power infrastructure. The outage appears to have been caused by human error. The report said that attacks capable of triggering "cascading disruptions and damage" to U.S. power infrastructure are not just theoretical threats, but a very real danger. In a statement APS said the outage was related to a 'procedure' at the North Gila substation northeast of Yuma. The error resulted in the 500 kV transmission line near Yuma tripping offline. In a cascading blackout, problems in one section of a power gird ripple out over the entire gird. Similar, larger blackouts have happened elsewhere. In 2008 for instance, a fire in a substation near Miami triggered a cascading blackout across a large swath of Florida, leaving three million people without power for hours. Any incident that results in an industrial control system being taken offline because of something happening upstream is, in a sense, a cyber incident.

However it spread, Thursday’s outage was a reminder that the nation’s transmission lines remain all too vulnerable to cascading power failures. In 2003, a blackout knocked out power to 50 million people in the Midwest and the Northeast. Two reactors at a nuclear power plant up the California coast went offline after losing electricity. Power was restored Friday morning. There was a roughly 10-minute gap between the time the power line failed and customers lost electricity, said Daniel Froetscher, vice president of energy delivery for Phoenix-based Arizona Public Service.

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Source :
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9219905/San_Diego_blackout_highlights_infrastructure_vulnerabilities
http://www.kansascity.com/2011/09/09/3132173/blackout-a-reminder-of-power-grid.html