FW: A rather bad day at the office

Any URLs to news coverage of this one?

- Bob

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jason Brown" <vafudar@earthlink.net>
To: <plug-discuss@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us>
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2000 8:39 AM
Subject: Fwd: FW: A rather bad day at the office


> 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...
>
> =====================================================================
>
> 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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