Florida probes how small mishaps caused massive outages

This article is about Florida authorities investigating how a small fire and a switch failure at an electrical substation outside Miami triggered a power failure that affected millions of people. When a nuclear power plant sensed the disruption, it shut down. In turn, the state's power grid triggered rolling blackouts Tuesday across the state.
More than 2 million people lost power at the peak of the outages, but electricity quickly was restored to most parts of the state.
Authorities said no injuries were reported.
Florida Power & Light President Armando Olivera said a disconnect switch failed at 1:08 p.m. ET Tuesday at an automated substation west of Miami, and a piece of equipment that controls voltage caught fire about the same time. Neither failure by itself would have caused a widespread outage, he said. The affected region ranged from Miami to Tampa, throughout Orlando and east to Brevard County, home to Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center. See a map of the areas affected »
The substation trouble set off a sequence of events that within two to three minutes had knocked numerous power plants off-line -- including the Turkey Point nuclear power plant south of Miami.
Olivera said Turkey Point's two nuclear reactors and a natural gas-powered generation unit automatically shut down when the plant's systems detected a fluctuation in the power grid.
"In a fraction of a second, the demand was far greater than the power plants that were online generating electricity could handle," he said. "When you have that kind of imbalance, we have a system that kicks in and it starts turning people's lights off, essentially balancing the demand with what's available." Miami International Airport, which has emergency generators, reported fewer than a dozen delays and had normal electric service back on within half an hour.
Schools remained in session during the blackout, said Cmdr. Charles Hurley, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade school system's police department. And Delrish Moss, a county police spokesman, said no major traffic problems had been reported.
"Most of the calls that we're getting have to do with people being stuck in elevators and things of that nature, and people concerned about what is going on," Moss said.
The outage struck as a strong cold front and scattered thunderstorms passed through the region -- including one that prompted a tornado warning for Fort Lauderdale, the National Weather Service said.
Stan Johnson, a spokesman for the North American Electric Reliability Corp., said eight generating units were off-line across the region.

My Opinion

I think its quite crazy to see that just a small accident could cause such a huge ruckuss. It affected so many people this disaster because of what happpened. I would be scared 2 if that happened to me. I just hope it wont if I'm stuck in an elevator or something i can't get out of at the time of the accident.