icon Second '96 Outage


In an article called Power Outage Darkens West, Matt Drudge reported that a second massive power outage had occurred on August 10, 1996.

Comments on the Internet regarding this second outage show that like the first massive power outage, this one did not have a believable explanation, nor did the outage affect only the US.

An explaination of sorts was given by California's PG&E, as reported by the San Francisco Chronical on August 27, 1996.

Two million Pacific Gas and Electric Co. customers would have been spared from the August 10 blackout if employees of an out-of-state power supplier had recognized and flagged the early signs of impending trouble, state regulators were told yesterday. ... The utility company was never warned that major transmission lines of the Pacific Intertie network had shorted out in Oregon, causing "islands" of outages in California and eight other western states. ... The circumstances of the August 10 outage are still being investigated. It appears, however, that the blackout was caused by a series of events.

Operators of the system got their first warning at 2:06 PM when a 500,000-volt transmission line in northern Oregon shorted out after sagging into a tree. About 46 minutes later, another 500,000-volt line went down for the same reason. ... About an hour later, two more high-voltage lines were shorted, again by lines sagging into trees, this time combining to "trip" a large power plant and cause the loss of 860 megawatts of power in 73 seconds. The rapid power loss caused the Intertie line to shut down, prompting automatic sensors to break transmission circuits at the Oregon-California border and other key points throughout the West.

[An] emergency meeting of the California Public Utilities Commission, [was] called to explore the reliability of the high-voltage transmission network, which serves 59 million people in 14 western states, two Canadian provinces and parts of northern Mexico.

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