One of the defining features of an industrialized society is the presence of an infrastructure that provides water, electricity, gas, and other utilities to the people. Recently, UC Berkeley experienced a failure of that infrastructure when power when out to the entire campus for a period of approximately 12 hours. This incident was noted in several media outlets, including Cal’s own Daily Cal.
Possibly because the failure was small in scope, there is a limited supply of information on what exactly happened. It is rumored that the system went down after earlier damage inflicted by copper thief was improperly repaired, triggering a cascading failure. The blackout was a technical problem – and therefore, somewhere along the line, engineers could have made decisions that mitigated or prevented the power going down that day.
The first question that I have at this point – Is there responsibility to be assigned for having power go down? Loosing power was an event that significantly disrupted campus live and its inhabitants livelihoods. A cascading failure is often a sign of a power system operating nears its limit – and yet, there is no information I know of of suggesting that the campus is at that point, and a cursory check indicates that there’s nowhere I can find this information out. Do engineers have a responsibility to monitor the power system, and warn people of possible issues? Does someone bear responsibility for ‘killing’ a half-day’s worth of productivity for the entire campus? Do the engineers who designed the power system bear that responsibility? In this case, I think that someone has the duty to inform their supervisors or the public about the age and fragility of the local infrastructure. System engineers would be the best equipped to answer this question. Unfortunately, I don’t know if such an assessment has been made or not. If there is blame to be had, I believe that it is the fault of the the copper thief, that the grid went down. He or she put in train the events that made the power go out.
Fortunately, there were only minor injuries and power was restored relatively quickly to Cal. However, other power failures, such as the much more publicized 2003 Northeast Blackout, did not have the same result. In this case, a power monitoring system went down in a control center – preventing system engineers from taking steps to balance loads when certain power transmission lines went down. The result was a power failure for a whole section of the country for 2 days, and 11 deaths supposedly resulting from the failure. Does the scale of this incident change anything from the previous example? If anything, it means that there is much more information available, which elucidates the degree to which the utilities were responsible. Again, the system was operating near design capacity, and in this case, negligence of engineers caused the power to go out. If anything, this example shows more clearly the role of engineers in such situations – and how their negligence can affect many people.
Class discuission notes:
Should the public know how vulnerable the infrastructure is?
– if people know about it, then there will be a push to fix it?
– was it human error? failed repair?
– 2003 – NE grid was down to 2.5 days
– people stuck in the elevators – people should have known, to plan accordingly and manage the risks
– open share vs. people that are paid to address these problems; more likely to fix the problem in the best way.
– security
– desentitized to the failure happening at Berkeley
– blame on the
– checking and maintaining the system should be part of the design process
– practice problems for undergrads – civil engineering department – power grid research
– students don’t need to be too involved in this – it’s the responsibility of the campus to ensure reliable systems
– no knowing is worse than it not being OK.
– not clear how to be safe on campus the next day; if they took until the morning to determine if it was safe, why didn’t they share more infomation?
– Information extists, but it’s not available to the public.
I don’t think it is more important to let students know the how vulnerable the infrastructure is than letting they how to be safe after the failure of infrastructure. So in my opinion, the answer to “is there responsibility to be assigned for having power go down?” is yes. But this responsibility should be more relate to the guideline of safety rather than monitoring the power system. As we know, engineers cannot avoid making mistakes. What we can do is learning from the mistakes and avoiding the same accident. Dough’s paper mentioned that “2003’s Northeast Blackout did not have the same result, the power failure actually last for 2 days. It is obvious that the similar accident happened again, but what more provoking is engineers actually did better job this time in Cal’s explosion. To conclude, there are always some uncertainty factor that we engineer cannot observe. The biggest responsibly that engineers should address is the safety and learing experience from past cases。
I feel that engineers are not the only ones to blame. Yes, they should ensure that people are aware of the consequences, but it also the responsibility of UC Berkeley to inform students of the possible risks. I do believe they did everything possible after the incident, but I also believe that the public should know the weaknesses in the infrastructure. People were trapped in elevators, and luckily, no one was severely hurt. However, the consequences had a ripple effect all over the campus. Because of this, I believe the public should be warned beforehand about what to do in this scenario. If the student body had been informed about the infrastructure problems, then there would have been a stronger rally for improvement of the generators and power grid. Engineers cannot predict everything, but I believe they should test what they put out over and over again so that they can try to lower the risk. If the equipment had been tested with varying amounts of power, then they would have determined the level at which the backup generator exploded. Engineers should retest and retest to prevent dangerous accidents from happening again.
I think a major part of this incident is the issue about when transparency is needed. In the case of the blackout in the Northeast, many people were held responsible, and much news was written about it because of the scope and because of its impact on the larger scale to the US economy and productivity. Berkeley was a much smaller incident and not reported as much because it is not seen as “national news” and only has effect upon people in Berkeley. If we look at an even smaller incident, the recent power outage at the Superbowl, we see that it was an even smaller incident than Berkeley with less consequences (no research gone, no productivity at a very productive university), but the incident received greater impact because the Superbowl is more in the spotlight than Berkeley is. Bearing this in mind, I think the core question is how transparency should be affected by how large the spotlight is on an event.