Hartsfield

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Engineer
It will be ...interesting.... to read the after-action reports of this debacle, if it leaks out.

One early conclusion: Toilets that need power to flush ain't always the best idea.
 
The nice thing about water is it stores quite easily. (If only lec-um-tricity did as well..)

Water towers not only provide vital peak-to-average buffering, they don't even blink when the PoCo lays an egg.....
 
We live in a world where venues are getting larger, more complex and more dependent on power. As a society we are going to have to recognize that failures in these types of venues are just to costly and must be better engineered to avoid these outages. It can be done, it just takes money.
While we only know what the press has reported and it likely is lacking in accuracy, but if it is true that a fire in a single substation brought the whole airport down I would say that is poor design and engineering to have such a single point of failure.
 
texie said:
... but if it is true that a fire in a single substation brought the whole airport down I would say that is poor design and engineering to have such a single point of failure.
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It SOUNDS like the fire was in/near the ATS, but that assume the non-technical press got nerdy parts correct. I heard one mention of 5 or 7 feeders, but they must all meet at some place.

To be fair, it's &%%^&%^ hard to not have single points of failure. You don't always control all the variables you think you do.

In the data world, a friend in the USG had to ensure there was actual redundancy on certain vital data circuits; no shard facilities, separate entrance trench to the facility, etc. To that end, an employee of his had to audit the circuits periodically. He would find that Circuit A from Carrier 24 was actually part of many 24 had leased from Carrier 32, but wait: 32 bundled those and got them from 66 as part of a huge amalgamation. (Seeing this data required pulling teeth at every stage as the carries didn't want you to know they didn't know themselves & had to search it out.) And 66's fiber was actually owned by 87. And inevitably, 87's was, for several miles, in the same trench as A*, the alternative.

So he/USG would demand a rerouting. But it was whack-a-mole, because when they got to Z & Z*, guess what.....
 
I thought it funny this morning when a CBS reporter was reporting the fire was in "a switchgear" but didn't quite know what that was or how to explain it to the audience.
 
Coppersmith said:
I thought it funny this morning when a CBS reporter was reporting the fire was in "a switchgear" but didn't quite know what that was or how to explain it to the audience.
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Oh, this is all about the airport? Okay, the toilet thing makes sense now. A lot was missing from the OP for an audience that may not be following mainstream media all day.

This is nothing new for the news. They mislead us all the time by their willfull ignorance of their money-maker-issue-of-the-day/week, especially when they describe guns. That would explain why I wasn't watching them to know what "Hartsfield" had to do with anything. Still don't, but at least now I knew we are talking about the airport power, just like the other thread.

I thought maybe some Hartsfield brand power toilet was having a recall for reverse-flow problems or something like that...
 
Coppersmith said:
I thought it funny this morning when a CBS reporter was reporting the fire was in "a switchgear" but didn't quite know what that was or how to explain it to the audience.
Click to expand...

from CBS....

"The bathrooms quickly turned malodorous. The sensors on toilets,
sinks and soap and towel dispensers stopped functioning, leaving
people futilely waving their hands in front of them."

oh. crap.

 
MAC702 said:
Oh, this is all about the airport? Okay, the toilet thing makes sense now. A lot was missing from the OP for an audience that may not be following mainstream media all day.

This is nothing new for the news. They mislead us all the time by their willfull ignorance of their money-maker-issue-of-the-day/week, especially when they describe guns. That would explain why I wasn't watching them to know what "Hartsfield" had to do with anything. Still don't, but at least now I knew we are talking about the airport power, just like the other thread.

I thought maybe some Hartsfield brand power toilet was having a recall for reverse-flow problems or something like that...
Click to expand...
I was at a loss on what the topic was initially as well.
 
kwired said:
I was at a loss on what the topic was initially as well.
Click to expand...

Sorry, it's such big news I just assumed everyone knew. It caused a major FUBAR in air traffic ops over much of the nation, in a week with little if any capacity to spare. (Some significant percentage of the commercial aircraft transit ATL at least once a day...)

I've now seen an article using the words "Automatic Transfer Switch" and "fire" in the same sentence. I can only imagine what such looks like for someplace like that.
 
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