Oh Crap - infrastructure
I am involved in our community Water Co-op. Our system delivers fantastic water to about 200 households and about 30 businesses in our community. It pumps from a well up to storage on the hillside above. The storage is large enough to provide gravity-fed water for a couple of days. The power goes out a couple times/year here so this is by design.
We also have a backup generator -- a nice one. It stays on standby but it also tests itself -- firing up once/month and running for ten minutes under load, logs the data and shuts down again.
We had a windstorm a month ago that brought a tree limb over the electrical feed to our wellhouse. Everything was fine but when we later tested the generator, it would run for about 20 minutes and then die. Tried this again, same failure. Again. Again.
Turned out to be a bad circuit board -- under warranty so we just had to pay for the service person to come out and swap.
It seems that this is not unique -- from New York City's
CBS affiliate:
NYU Hospital Evacuated After Backup Generator Goes Down
Over 200 patients at New York University Langone Medical Center-Tisch Hospital were being evacuated Monday night, after power went out as a result of Superstorm Sandy and generators subsequently began to go down.
As CBS 2’s Dick Brennan reported, power went down across Manhattan from 39th Street south to the southern tip of the island – a region that includes the hospital. Backup generators were in operation, but started to fail in the 11 p.m. hour, and an evacuation began.
An army of 50 to 70 ambulances lined up along 30th Street at First Avenue, where the hospital is located. They lined up all the way up First Avenue around the corner to 30th Street, and backed up.
Robert Grossman, Dean Of NYU Medical Center, told CBS 2′s Brennan that “We’ve had a number of power failures of primary and secondary backup systems.”
CRAP! We are just a rural county water system with a couple days reserve capacity -- this is a large urban Hospital.
Another bad design element:
Making things more complicated is the fact there are no elevators in the building and many patients are being carried down stairs.
Don't know if the reporter means no functioning elevators but either way, this is not good. Implementing a ramp system between floors would not take that much space (a 20' by 20' structure outside the building's walls at the most generous)
No -- our generator will be running it's usual test every month but every fourth test will be manual and we will let it drive the pumps for a couple hours. A bit more fuel expensive when we are trying to save money (do not want to raise the water rates) but reliability is the element here.
That Hospital should have been running manual backup tests under full load once every other week at least...
Posted by DaveH at October 29, 2012 10:06 PM