Murphy's law in action Jason Brown ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: FW: Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 14:44:31 -0800 From: "Marek, Jeff" -----Original Message----- From: Howard, Brad C Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2000 8:35 AM To: Marek, Jeff; Ifill, Everton; Mastrorilli, John; Rubino, Pete J; Leighton, Bill; Fortunato, Michael J Subject: FW: For those of you that might not receive the Diblert newsletter... ===================================================================== We tested our Y2K power contingency plans a few weeks before New Year's. The Induhviduals in IT didn't expect any downtime, so the test was performed during the normal work day. The idea was that when power was cut, the six generators would kick on and we wouldn't notice a thing. Three generators failed to start. Two threw their breakers due to the high load on them. The last was overwhelmed when the previous two cut out and threw a tremendous surge through the lines, blowing up hundreds of light bulbs, frying fax machines, radios and pencil sharpeners along the way. The surge jumped circuits in our industrial level surge protector and traveled through our "surge protected" lines to every desktop in the company plus the server room. After taking out over a hundred monitors and almost forty PCs, the surge proceeded to destroy our server room air conditioner, four huge UPS systems, thirteen servers and both AS/400s. Several small fires started throughout the building, including our now half-melted Christmas tree and our molten-menorah. The surge then jumped the lines into the main power grid, blowing up two transformers, one of which fell on the IT manager's car (poetic justice) and cutting power on the entire block. The remaining generator then proceeded to burst into flames, eventually blowing up all six generators and burning up seven cars. This all occurred within about thirty seconds and sent 38 people to the hospital, cost the company over $650,000 in equipment (not to mention the impending lawsuits), destroyed eight cars and caused weeks of downtime. Three people quit the company. One woman is still in the hospital with electrical burns. The resulting publicity got us on television in five states. -------------------------------------------------------