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.