Blackout
Los Angeles had a major power outage this afternoon. Hindi brownout ang tawag dito. Blackout or power outage. Why kasi "brown"out ang term?
I was at work, on the 43rd floor in downtown LA. Around noontime, i noticed my PC flicker slightly. Oh so very slightly, so i didn't care. Then a few minutes before 1pm, i went to our kitchen to heat up my lean cuisine frozen lunch. I put it on 3 minutes, but i noticed that the microwave was kind of silent. It was working, i can see the light inside the microwave, and the timer counting down, but then something wasn't quite right. I was staring at the microwave to see if the settings were messed up. Anyway, my food was done, so i went back to my desk and started eating it. Then after about a minute, the power in our building went out. PCs died, lights went out, airconditioning stopped. Then, a few seconds later, the emergency lights and generators came on.
Some of my officemates had handheld radios and we listened to the news. Power outage nga sa Los Angeles area. Our building security was talking over the P.A. to calm everybody down and to say that only one elevator is working per elevator bank, and it should only be used for emergencies. I guess a lot of panic-y people raced to the elevators to evacuate the building.
But not our dept - the IT dept. We were more concerned with our systems, servers and other equipments. We were told that we only had enough back-up power for 2 hours. So, we were busy coordinating our Disaster Recovery plan. We were trained to react to disasters and which systems and servers to bring up first, which can be sacrificed and turned off. We have an Irvine office, and we were already talking about going to Irvine in case of a long-term power outage (fyi...Irvine is about 60 miles from our LA headquarters).
Since airconditioning is down, our computers might not survive, even the 2 hour back-up power. We scrambled around the office to look for every desk fan (electric fan baga) we can find and put it in our data processing center for our computers. I was laughing to myself. Here we were, human beings, and yet we were more concerned about the computers. We didn't evacuate the building because we need to make sure our high-priority servers are working. Tapos, wala ngang ercon, we were almost sweating, but yet we sacrificed the electric fans just so mahanginan ang computers namin.
But, after about an hour of downtime, the power got restored. My PC took forever to reboot, but finally got logged in. I tested all the servers i'm responsible for. So far so good.
Turns out that Utility workers were to blame: "when workers installing an automated alert system cut several wires simultaneously, instead of one at a time."
wonder if they got terminated instantly?
I was at work, on the 43rd floor in downtown LA. Around noontime, i noticed my PC flicker slightly. Oh so very slightly, so i didn't care. Then a few minutes before 1pm, i went to our kitchen to heat up my lean cuisine frozen lunch. I put it on 3 minutes, but i noticed that the microwave was kind of silent. It was working, i can see the light inside the microwave, and the timer counting down, but then something wasn't quite right. I was staring at the microwave to see if the settings were messed up. Anyway, my food was done, so i went back to my desk and started eating it. Then after about a minute, the power in our building went out. PCs died, lights went out, airconditioning stopped. Then, a few seconds later, the emergency lights and generators came on.
Some of my officemates had handheld radios and we listened to the news. Power outage nga sa Los Angeles area. Our building security was talking over the P.A. to calm everybody down and to say that only one elevator is working per elevator bank, and it should only be used for emergencies. I guess a lot of panic-y people raced to the elevators to evacuate the building.
But not our dept - the IT dept. We were more concerned with our systems, servers and other equipments. We were told that we only had enough back-up power for 2 hours. So, we were busy coordinating our Disaster Recovery plan. We were trained to react to disasters and which systems and servers to bring up first, which can be sacrificed and turned off. We have an Irvine office, and we were already talking about going to Irvine in case of a long-term power outage (fyi...Irvine is about 60 miles from our LA headquarters).
Since airconditioning is down, our computers might not survive, even the 2 hour back-up power. We scrambled around the office to look for every desk fan (electric fan baga) we can find and put it in our data processing center for our computers. I was laughing to myself. Here we were, human beings, and yet we were more concerned about the computers. We didn't evacuate the building because we need to make sure our high-priority servers are working. Tapos, wala ngang ercon, we were almost sweating, but yet we sacrificed the electric fans just so mahanginan ang computers namin.
But, after about an hour of downtime, the power got restored. My PC took forever to reboot, but finally got logged in. I tested all the servers i'm responsible for. So far so good.
Turns out that Utility workers were to blame: "when workers installing an automated alert system cut several wires simultaneously, instead of one at a time."
wonder if they got terminated instantly?
posted by breesmom @ 9:20 PM
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