A recent event in New York made me think of one of those times I played tourist in New York.
This is my review of Barrier Brewing Riprap Baltic Porter (H/T Iobot)
Why was I wandering around Manhattan when I was 19? To be honest it was a family vacation and we were passing through. It was one of those things we sort of decided on the fly because we were on our way to Maine. Lower Manhattan experienced a small outage that particular day which prompted us to leave and seek refuge in Connecticut. But about a year later….
Fifteen years ago today, at about 4:10 p.m., New York City was suddenly powerless, as all electricity disappeared when an overgrown tree branch hit a power line in Cleveland (and a utility company’s alarm system failed). Eight northeast states, plus Ontario—in total more than 50 million people—were plunged into darkness.
While they had to endure about 30 hours without electricity, New Yorkers turned the blackout into a moment of urban solidarity: Citizens started to direct traffic since traffic lights were out; they helped each other out of trapped subway cars; welcomed in stranded colleagues who couldn’t get home; restaurants held impromptu cookouts, sharing their food and beer with neighbors.
It wasn’t all fun: 413 subway trains and 400,000 passengers were stopped and all needed to be evacuated. That process took almost three hours, and a federal report noted, “Unfortunately, the passengers flowing into the streets from underground met a massive amount of congestion in the streets and on the sidewalks due to the volume of vehicles and pedestrians.”
Now high voltage troubleshooting is similar to troubleshooting any circuit. You start at the affected point, test for voltage to phase to phase, phase to ground, phase to neutral, and neutral to ground. Each test has an “normal” reading, the actual reading provides a clue to the problem. The hart part is accessing the circuit since its suspended on poles or underground. Thankfully the circuit is big and easy to see, especially if it is overhead.
So why did this outage last for as long as it did? According to the Electrical Schoolhouse at the 366 Training Squadron, Sheppard AFB, TX: this was a “really, really, really big circuit.” One of the civilian instructors had this satellite photo made into a poster.
The Department of Energy had this to say:
Transmission lines are designed with the expectation that they will sag lower when they become hotter. The transmission line gets hotter with heavier line loading and under higher ambient temperatures, so towers and conductors are designed to be tall enough and conductors pulled tightly enough to accommodate expected sagging and still meet safety requirements. On a summer day, conductor temperatures can rise from 60°C on mornings with average wind to 100°C with hot air temperatures and low wind conditions.
A short-circuit occurred on the Harding-Chamberlin 345-kV line due to a contact between the line conductor and a tree. This line failed with power flow at only 44% of its normal and emergency line rating. Incremental line current and temperature increases, escalated by the loss of Harding-Chamberlin, caused more sag on the Hanna-Juniper line, which contacted a tree and failed with power flow at 88% of its normal and emergency line rating. Star-South Canton contacted a tree three times between 14:27:15 EDT and 15:41:33 EDT, opening and reclosing each time before finally locking out while loaded at 93% of its emergency rating at 15:41:35 EDT. Each of these three lines tripped not because of excessive sag due to overloading or high conductor temperature, but because it hit an overgrown, untrimmed tree.22
A recloser is a device, as the name implies, designed to immediately close the circuit in the presence of a temporary fault, within the device’s safe capacity. Ever notice the lights flicker once, twice, three times, and then go out? That is a recloser in action. Phase to phase voltage on a standard 7,200v circuit should read around 12,470v; as a idea of what the fault voltage could theoretically be. The immediate fault voltage should be high enough to either burn the branch shorting it, or at least bump it off, and continue providing uninterrupted distribution.
This was 345,000v line. Next time you are around one of the towers, consider how tall the towers is, how low the lines sag, and how tall that tree had to be. Then consider why there are never any birds on that wire (induction).
The massive recloser in Ohio worked as designed, it closed three times and locked open. This caused a voltage drop on that circuit, and every other circuit it was back feeding. Affecting distribution in the most densely populated part of North America, on a warm summer afternoon. That had to suck.
What does not suck is this beer; it is a Baltic Porter. It has a high abv of around 10%. It is somewhat heavy in body but unlike a stout it is not an overwhelming coffee or chocolate, the high alcohol content certainly drowns a lot of spices and flavors out. Definitely not one to chug, especially on summer day. Nice call Iobot. Barrier Brewing Riprap Baltic Porter: 4.3/5
Comments
153 responses to “Lights Out”
That sounds like a decent beer.
I hated dealing with downed power lines.
Order pizza and wait for PG&E?
That sounds like a decent beer.
I hated dealing with downed power lines.
Woohoo! First AND second without even trying.
Right, but we still don’t know how you feel about decent beer and downed power lines.
What did he about them?
I love a good dark brown beer, but not necessarily in the summer.
As for downed power lines, they will try and re-energize three times. And they jump and flop around when they do. As a result, you have to create an exclusion zone one pole in each direction. Given that this usually happens in a storm in the middle of the night, you then get to sit and wait for two hours until the power company shows up.
Oh yes. The zone of equipotential…
And a double post!
downed power lines
Even the undowned ones are warm and unfuzzy
Even if you try to fuzz the line?
Alright, we’re back to euphemisms.
I love stouts and Porters. In temperatures like these they are about as appealing as hot chocolate or potato soup.
As I was thirsty and staring at the singles fridge at my usual liquid refreshment store yesterday a kid started loading his arm with twisted tea like he was carrying firewood into the house. I asked if they were good, and he said, “dude, I fucking love the mutherfucking shit out of these”. He sold me with that sales pitch and I tried one. Those things are dangerous. 24oz downed in four gulps of thirst quenching tastiness.
Hard to argue with such an eloquent review as that.
The kid looked like he just walked off a construction site and we may have touched a hundred yesterday so I figured he knew the best thirst quencher in the fridge. Turned out it was a solid review.
Sounds rather like my own near-death experiences with Long Island Iced Tea (and yes, I know LIIT is actually tea-less,) which is much too tasty for my own good.
A friend of mine in college had a bad experience with Long Island Iced Tea. It was his first alcoholic beverage.
Trick Question. Potato soup is never appealing.
As a kid, mid-40s, potato soup was a staple in the Fourscore household. And bread. My Mom worked 2nd shift in a bakery, on Friday dinners (suppers for us) all the dried bread, heels and any leftovers came out, my Dad made French toast with 2-3 eggs and we boys loved it, drenched in Karo syrup. Times were good, my Mom would bring home, on the street car, stuff that hit the floor or close to it so we had coffee cake or other pastries with our main courses.
I remember walking ~10 miles home from work that day. With a pit-stop at my favorite bar. And drinking beer all night on my stoop because it was too hot to sleep.
We only lost power for about five hours.
You need to check your electro-privilege.
With Hurricane Irene, we lost power for 46 hours.
Others had it much worse.
Sucky deal.
We had an ice storm in ’97 that snapped power poles like twigs for miles and miles. A very large area had no power for 72+ hours. In early April with nighttime temps below freezing and daytime temps not much above.
But we have a tiny percentage of people as NY so it didn’t really hit the news.
I’m reminded of this one
I remember that. It was rough on people
I don’t even remember that one. No impact that I can recall. It didn’t wreck my commute for 18 months like Superduperstorm Sandy.
2 weeks after Hurricane Ike.
Stuck in NYC that day – obviously couldn’t get home to NJ.
Explained to my wife that after the fiasco in the city that occurred after 9/11 that TOP MEN that ran the NYC and NJ were fucking useless. During 9/11 I was able to spend the night at a relative’s place during the blackout I wasn’t so lucky. Instead I spend the night on a couch at my club.
If anything of any significance hits NYC every single system there is so fragile everything grinds to a halt. It’s fucking unreal how useless all the TOP MEN are. Anybody with a clue should easily be able to hurt an ungodly number of people while these assholes pass laws about proper pronoun usage. Fortunately most people are good…
When I was assigned to NYC we worked with the various command centers and disaster response fusion centers. NYC is on incredibly tight supply chains. Disruption of 72 hours or more on food would leave most stores running out of all but canned goods- even without panic buying. Manhattan would be the worst hit since it has few entries and almost no warehousing.
One of their major supply lines is a car float.
Been waiting for the appropriate article to post this
He grabbed me round my slender neck
I could not shout or scream.
He carried me into his room
Where we could not be seen;
He tore away my flimsy wrap
And gazed upon my form —
I was so cold and still and damp,
While he was wet and warm.
His feverish mouth he pressed to mine —
I let him have his way —
He drained me of my very self,
I could not say him nay.
He made me what I am, alas!
That’s why you find me here,
A broken vessel, broken glass,
That once held bottled beer.
Homeless guy othered, drinks from a warm can
I initially assumed this was STEVE SMITH fan poetry.
This is disturbing
It gave you an erection, didn’t it?
That was beautiful, Hobbit. Thanks for sharing.
That’s by Emily Dickinson, right?
Found it in the Ribald Classics section of an old Playboy magazine attributed to “Anonymous”. I knew this crowd would like it.
Sehr gut!
He grabbed me round my slender neck
I could not shout or scream.
He carried me into his room
Hawt
And in the tradition of Great Lakes naming beers after local disasters, they renamed their imperial stout Blackout Stout. I preferred the old label, which showed people sitting on their front steps sharing beer and other perishables.
That beer looks delicious.
I would definitely drink that in the winter.
I put a couple of big beers in the fridge last night to take to a party tonight, It’s a Christmas in July party, so it seemed appropriate. A 2014 Stone Imperial Russian Stout, a 2007 Goose Island Bourbon County Stout, and a 2016 (I believe) barrel aged Gavel Slammer from Hoppin’ Frog.
The first two are great beers. They must have aged well.
I never had the last.
The last one was a pub only release at Hoppin’ Frog. They’re very well known for their amazing line of stouts, and were one of the main breweries pushing for the removal of Ohio’s 12% ABV cap a couple years back. The first “official” over 12% beer professionally brewed in Ohio was named Gavel Slammer to commemorate the passing of the bill. They brewed a second batch, and parked it in some bourbon barrels for about a year. That’s the third beer.
The gavel that was used for the Ohio state Congressional session that passed the bill to remove the cap was presented to the head brewer/owner of Hoppin’ Frog, and is mounted on the wall there.
Whoa. I’m jealous.
Leave that for when (if) I post a picture of my beer cellar. 🙂
We had a blackout in our neighborhood the other day.
But the police made him get back in his car.
(Old Emo Phillips joke that might not be allowed today)
Learn English with Ricky Gervais and Karl Pilkington.
Tasty.
https://www.ratebeer.com/beer/fort-george-city-of-dreams/574644/
This was the first place to hear ‘The Eagle has landed’
Interesting article. Mahalo.
Watching the EVA on CSPAN right now.
‘Merica: Former LSU Tigers lineman Matt Branch shot by dog on hunting trip
Turned off the safety, mmm hmmm.
Nearly died and ending up losing his leg, unfortunately. That’s r… tough.
It nearly happened to me. If you lay the gun down with a push button safety pointed up it isn’t all that unlikely for a dog stepping on the trigger guard to press the safety off and trip the trigger at the same time. I laid my Browning Auto 5 on a sleeping bag in just that manner. It was really stupid because in hind sight of course the damned dog was going to get on the sleeping bag. Fortunately I was not in line with the barrel.
Dogs setting off guns happens more often than you would think.
I wonder if the dog also loaded it, chambered a round, and placed it in the truck so that the barrel was pointed towards the people loading the truck.
That is a good question.
That dog do hunt.
LOL, Bravo.
Genius didn’t unload his gun before putting it away. I’m sorry he was injured but he has only himself to blame.
I wake up from a nap on the couch and the wife is watching Crocodile Dundee. I forgot how truly awful that movie was. I will take Jaws over this any day of the week.
You think that’s a moivee? This is a moivee.
How apropos. Power was out here last night. My last good fruit bearing apple tree did not survive the night.
What happened to it?
A friend of mine had a dozen very nice fruit trees…apple, pear and peach. Then he bought goats. Did you know that goats climb trees? They killed all of his trees.
For a while I wanted goats. Then multiple people started telling me stories just like your friend’s. I no longer want goats.
I planted 3 apple trees this year, 2 died but Menard’s cheerfully refunded my money. Now I have to wait another year and try again. I planted inside a chain link fence but the deer are busy trying to figure things out.
Was that the problem, CPRM? The deer like the lights on and a radio that plays music.
No, storm.
Can you prune the broken stuff off and maybe it’ll recover over time?
the only thing standing is a stump.
Speaking of lights going out, what are the signs that a breaker is going bad?
Does it reset?
It takes a few tries, even with stuff unplugged from the circuit.
So it trips, you reset it and it bounces back? What kind if breaker?
Beyong being a 15 amp single width switch, I can’t tell much about it.
Not a GFI is what I am getting at. The springs within the breaker can wear out over time, especially if you are constantly resetting it.
My first suggestion is to reduce the load your appliances are putting on the circuit before changing out the breaker, but the breaker itself can be a point of failure.
I haven’t had to reset it before this summer.
But now it’s tripping even with loads lower than it used to just soldier on through. Every time it tripped I reduced load. It doesn’t seem to be helping,
Classic signs of a failing breaker.
Call an electrician. Breaker itself is probably well under $20 with probably a $200 install fee.
Hmm…in that case, do you own a screwdriver?
I own a number of screwdrivers, I just don’t want to shut down power to the house when it’s 95 degrees out and there are other rooms which still have AC.
probably a $200 install fee.
Good god! I’ll do it for $50… plus travel expanses of course.
Open the panel, remove the cover….carefully.
Determine the type of circuit breaker it is. Bolt on vs plug in.
Go to any hardware store, and purchase an identical ciruit breaker….
Turn off the main breaker, and replace the bad breaker.
Joy.
Well if you don’t want to replace it the best case scenario are continued nuisance trips. Worst case can be the breaker stops tripping which might trip the main breaker…or your house catches fire.
Your call. Plenty of videos on youtube to coach you through the process. Its an easy fix.
I’ve watched a few of them when the first trips happened.
I’m just not enthused with having to drag myself out of the house because of this.
Pay Hyperbole to do it.
I’ll do it for $40 plus traveling expenses.
…and just to make sure. When you are resetting it, you are pulling the arm to the open (off) position, then back to closed, correct?
Otherwise the arm just bounces back to trip.
I have no evidence of a third position. Where’s it supposed to sit when merely tripped instead of off?
In between
I find it flipped all the way left whenever I get to the box, on being all the way right for that row of breakers.
Don’t use any cyanoacrylate glues.
?
Trip isn’t in exact middle. It’s more towards the off position (electricity is physically separated similar to off). If it’s to the left when tripped, push it even further to the left. There should be some travel. Then flip it right.
If you turn off a breaker above or below when tripped, the difference should be more apparent.
Gustave – When I switched off this breaker to make sure I had the right one, it didn’t want to switch back on. So I’m convinced something was faulty within it.
Luckily it was only about $10 for a new 15A breaker of the same type.
Replace it.
^This^
They are too cheap and easy to replace to take any chances. Find the nearest hardware store. Bring the old one if you can to make sure you get the same brand/amperage.
Whoa. no electricians. it is too easy.
Hit the main breaker to turn everything off. Remove the faulty breaker. Turn main breaker back on. Go to any hardware store buy new one just like the old one.
Turn main breaker off. Install new breaker. Turn main breaker back on.
*I am not a credentialed electrician. I am just telling everyone what I would do.
You forgot “Have fun resetting all the clocks”. 😉
Sorry Ted, but the clocks in my house have barry backups.
They didn’t lose their time.
*battery.
Wow, that’s an awful typo. I don’t want Barry as a backup for my clocks.
Follow the instructions the glibs have given you. Really don’t even have to throw the main breaker, since with your CB off the load side is dead. Carefully pull it out, unscrew the screw and replace the CB with the new one, turn it back on.
I suggest you turn off the mains and get the kid next door that fixes the computer stuff. They know everything.
I replaced the breaker with a brand new 15A bolt-down one which has a clearer tip indicator.
Power has been restored, but… one of the drives in my RAID array may have failed. Luckily the rest are still working.
If this onw does not trip like the old one, I’ll know I haven’t developed a short in that circuit.
Tattoos?
Good one!
When I was in the service I was admonished about the use of “bad” vs. “faulty”.
Punch the person who admonished you.
If they outrank you, make sure they die from it and dispose of the body.
If you ever work for a farmer, never tell them the tractor needs more “gas”.
*ahem*
https://greenmagazine.com/bringing-gas-tractor-21st-century/
I was expecting a natural gas tractor.
Wood gas or white gas could have worked also.
Steam is a gas
Yes, yes. I have one of these with a gasoline engine.
For field work, gas powered tractors have been our of favor for probably 50 years.
I love those older classics.
Interest in unlicensed pharmaceutical production?
Wanting to be called Heisenberg?
There are some good ones in PowerLines Week in Pictures
Agree. I particularly liked the CNN headline: “Director of Planned Parenthood forced out after 8 months.”
note – probably should have put single quotes around ‘CNN headline’ – not sure about the veracity of that.
*waits for Ted’S’s comment’s
Yes, those are excellent. I like the last one.
Given the title of the article, here’s my contribution.
*Looks at BakedPenguin, taps foot impatiently*
Yeah, I got nothin’
Well, except a better song with the same name.
Peter Wolf was such a great spaz to watch on stage tho.
I can believe that. I used to like a few J. Geils songs, and even in those videos, he looked like his dancing was being interrupted by a petit mal seizure at times.
Are you related to Eddie Trunk?
How about this one?
Wasn’t that about someone getting killed and someone else getting hanged for it?
Pretty dark, Ted.
Heh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5je2H8eP8g
I’m disappointed in all of you.
With that in mind, I’m surprised nobody has thrown Scorpions out there.
Or this.
One of the most frustrating things about blackouts is a lot of them never had to happen. If the tax subsidies spent on the green energy boondoggles had been for updating and hardening utility infrastructure, they would occur far less frequently. Instead, if anything, wind and solar has made our electric grids less secure because of the extreme variability of their production, as well as the insistence on forcing utilities to buy this energy when it happens to show up. The nation has been forced to waste billions on tech that does nothing – at best – to either secure energy flow, and nothing to address the alleged goals of the useful idiots espousing it. (Reducing CO2 emissions).
If they spend money to update the infrastructure they won’t be able to tell us we need to pay more taxes to update the infrastructure.
Rand didn’t dub them ‘looters’ for no reason.
Looters can be shot on sight, right?
That is a bad road to go down. We need to stop enabling them.
Almost every major wildfire in CA in the last few years was caused by poorly maintained power lines.
It all could have been avoided If they had bothered to replace the hundred year old transmission towers instead of wasting subsidies on bullshit.
The Paradise fire liability alone could run into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
It only took about 6 hours to push mow 3/4 of an acre. Better than I expected.
Ick. I’m never doing that kind of thing again. I’d go without beer before push mowing.
I use a push-reel mower, and it gets physically hard to push if you’re a lazyass and let the grass get too shaggy (like I did). Granted, I don’t have a very large property, but it was 30 minutes of fairly hard work. After doing that and pulling weeds for another 30 minutes, I came into the AC, sat in front of a fan, and drank three glasses of ice-cold peach juice.
https://www.mclaneedgers.com/product/20-power-reel/
Damn. It looks like one of the drives in the RAID did die.
🙁
Did you try resetting it?
I’ll try a few things, the problem is I’m overly warm and sweaty because the AC was off while I was getting a replacement breaker, and the living room hasn’t cooled down yet.
I was just being a smart ass.
Glad to see you went and got a breaker. But, just in case; I am still willing to undercut The Hyperbole by $10 if you want to hire someone.
That would require being smart. :-p
Hey, 1 out of 2 is pretty good, right?
2 out of 3 ain’t bad; I don’t know about 50%.
Or checking the thermostat?
My desktop wasn’t booting up, it would freeze on windows load or say no OS files. It was freaking me out, opened her up and swapped the SATA cable with another drive and it booted right up, now the drive that I swapped cables with isn’t showing, so I have a bad SATA cable or port, crappy but better than a bad drive. Now I have to dig out a different cable and try to get that other drive to show up since it has a bunch of work files on it. But I’ll wait til tomorrow to deal with that, too exhausted today.
Salvage the magnets.
Apply tannerite.
Profit.
I have about 40 kWh of home battery storage. I’m going to be really popular during the next blackout.
I’m glad you enjoyed this one. It’s one of my favorite offerings from Barrier. I would have commented earlier but our wee slice of NYC had a 2 hour blackout today.