Murphy's law in action
Jason Brown
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Subject: FW:
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 14:44:31 -0800
From: "Marek, Jeff" <
jeff.marek@intel.com>
-----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...
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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.
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