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Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco

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Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco

#41

Post by perlin »

groby_b wrote: post #30
perlin wrote: post #7

Crazy conspiracy theory: the Chinese and/or Russians have most likely already compromised our power grid and other infrastructure control systems and are waging covert economical war by disrupting important services.

Crazy reality here: SF was caused by a substation fire. http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/04/21/power-outage-shu...

It'd be pretty easy to trigger a substation fire by feeding lower values into the voltage sensors than how much was actually flowing. Similar to how Stuxnet faked the values it was overriding so that everything seemed normal when in reality the centrifuges were spinning out of control. As another commenter pointed out, it's just keeping an open mind...

Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco

#42

Post by rdiddly »

pps43 wrote: post #16
perlin wrote: post #7

Crazy conspiracy theory: the Chinese and/or Russians have most likely already compromised our power grid and other infrastructure control systems and are waging covert economical war by disrupting important services.

Not likely because of Hanlon's razor: "don't attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

At best Hanlon's razor is a bet on the odds that most cases are stupidity and not malice (probably true). It doesn't mean there is no malice in the world and only stupidity.

Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco

#43

Post by Animats »

LA's outages are widely scattered, and are being blamed on high winds.[1] Crews are fixing distribution lines and transformers. Probably unrelated.

The NYC subway outages may have originated at two locations. The MTA says they lost signal power at 42nd/Grand Central, and utility power from Con Ed at 7th Avenue. Trains can run through the 7th Avenue station but the station is out of action. (The NYC subway system has three separate power systems - traction, signal, and utility.) No info on cause yet, but the problems are mostly fixed or bypassed now.

SF's outage is still vague, but is being blamed on a fire at the big substation on Larkin. SFFD says they've been using large amounts of CO2 to put out smoldering insulation. SFFD also says they're caught up after getting 20 people out of stuck elevators. PG&E isn't saying much.[2] They list "cause" as "unknown". They probably can't even get into the Larkin substation yet.

[1] https://www.sce.com/wps/portal/home/outage-center/check-outa... [2] https://m.pge.com/#outages

Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco

#44

Post by Rebelgecko »

xer0x wrote: post #36
flowersoldier wrote: post #35

Hmmmm...I'm trying to verify the outage in LA. The tweet about the power outage at LAX is from today, but the other tweet in the example is from 2/22/17. No articles about a power outage in LA are popping up on google. Something about this article feels a bit click-baity.

Seems like something is going on in LA: https://m.sce.com/outage/OutageMap.html

Unless a bunch of outages have cleared up, looks pretty typical to me. The biggest outage I'm seeing on that map is labelled as planned maintenance, affecting 66 people. Nothing major on the LADWP map either.

Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco

#45

Post by lloeki »

tlrobinson wrote: post #26
api wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a valid hypothesis and not crazy at all. If this were random I'd expect totally random cities, not the three most economically significant. It might not be covert economic warfare, but more of a covert demonstration whose audience is intended to be the US government. "We have lots of dangerous 0-days, and there's a lot more where these came from." In that case public credit would never be claimed. It reminds me…

"If this were random I'd expect totally random cities, not the three most economically significant." I would be very surprised if there weren't at least 3 power outages in random cities on a daily basis, you just don't hear about it until it's 3 major cities.

> I would be very surprised if there weren't at least 3 power outages in random cities on a daily basis, you just don't hear about it until it's 3 major cities

I wouldn't even be surprised if it regularly were 3 major cities at about the same time and it's just that statistically someone had to end up taking notice and trying to make sense out of it when it's actually a somehow random† distribution of events, the latest of which happening to be clustered.

But digital warfare seems to somehow look more exciting to many, probably because it's intuitively less frightening than waving nukes at each other's nose, while it may very well impact people's lives for the worst in a very large, non-obvious and pernicious way.

† Some events may be random but aren't independent across because of interconnections and dispatching woes[0]. Managing a power grid or three is a fascinating thing in itself.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout

Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco

#46

Post by tyingq »

api wrote: post #39
tyingq wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's this: http://insideenergy.org/2014/08/18/data-explore-15-years-of-... Which includes a link to this Google spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AdxhulfM9jeqviIZihuO...

Great find. At a glance it looks like 1-2 dozen per month, so a coincidence is definitely plausible. Have to wait and see.

You could argue that none of the ones today are weather related. If you remove the weather related outages, it's easier to support the notion of a conspiracy. I don't personally think this is one, but...

Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco

#47

Post by exolymph »

yequalsx wrote: post #33
pps43 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not likely because of Hanlon's razor: "don't attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

Hanlon's Razor is not an established law of reasoning or of philosophy. Quoting it is not a valid counter argument without additional reasoning given.

Of course not, it's a colloquial heuristic. Do you disagree with this comment though? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14168483

Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco

#50

Post by Caveman_Coder »

perlin wrote: post #41
groby_b wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crazy reality here: SF was caused by a substation fire. http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/04/21/power-outage-shu...

It'd be pretty easy to trigger a substation fire by feeding lower values into the voltage sensors than how much was actually flowing. Similar to how Stuxnet faked the values it was overriding so that everything seemed normal when in reality the centrifuges were spinning out of control. As another commenter pointed out, it's just keeping an open mind...

Could you explain this further? I'm not sure how innacurate voltage readings would cause a fire...
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