Power outage cripples Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport

[Homer J Simpson]

Not a very good backup system in place.............

http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/17/us/atlanta-airport-power-outage/index.html

[alanb]

Not Unique

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-06/british-airways-points-to-human-error-for-may-flight-outage

[jonovid]

let me guess, it has something to do with weather based electricity generation technology and a lack of baseload or tesla batteries! 

[ez24]

Rats

[BradC]

let me guess, it has something to do with weather based electricity generation technology and a lack of baseload or tesla batteries! 

As much as we all love to point and laugh when the inevitable happens to poorly thought out renewable power installations, making the same tired joke anytime *any* power outage happens doesn't help the cause, it just starts to look like a rabid anti-renewable campaign.

In this instance it wasn't remotely related, and was instead one of those single point of multiple failures in a redundant system. Rather than a joke it's a pretty good lesson.

[ez24]

Someone being interviewed about this said it looks like rats chewed through some cables (they were frayed).  ie rats (the animal) did this.

Like someone said speed caused the train wreak.

Both are just the first opinions by someone being interviewed (not the public).  In my experience most are correct.

So for today's news it was rats and speed.  I gotta go now and try and catch one.

[TimFox]

Apparently, the problem was that the switches to switch over to backup power were located in the same region where the fire took out the main power distribution switches.  My guess is that the system was tested by checking that the switch-over to backup worked when activated on a test schedule, without so much fire present.

[rrinker]

 This was the real cause