Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Digital Day | Jun 15, 2006 08:49

Freeview - a free-to-air digital TV platform modelled on the one of the same name in Britain - will be officially unveiled at Parliament at midday. I can't tell you exactly what will be said, but my column in this month's Unlimited covers most of the bases and speculates on programming issues, which won't be covered today. Feel free to read ahead.

No Right Turn scoops the big media, other bloggers and the Opposition parties again. Can you say, 2008 deadline for historical Treaty claims?

Alasdair Thompson of the Northern declared on Morning Report yesterday: "What we need is a security of supply at competitive prices. Full stop." Yes, and I'd like free Internet and world peace, but I'm not expecting either right now. What Thompson is saying is that he wants a gold-plated service from Transpower, but he doesn't want to pay for it.

But whether things make any sense doesn't seem much of an obstacle to sounding off this week. Stuff had the government "being accused of ignoring warnings about the state of the national electricity system" and Nick Smith screamed himself hoarse saying the same thing in Parliament, but no one seemed inclined to spoil the story by pointing out that what happened isn't what the warnings have been about: ie, capacity, not redundancy; and that controversial capacity through the Waikato in particular. Smith himself has done a creditable job in snapping at the government's heels over security of supply, but he hasn't previously had a word to say about the newfound vulnerability of Otahuhu. Smith appears to back both increased gas-powered generation in and near Auckland (which seems essential), and the Transpower line through the Waikato, but unfortunately his colleague Judith Collins doesn't want Transpower's pylons ("steel monstrosities") in her electorate at all and backs such exotic options as an undersea cable from the South Island to Auckland. If they're going to accuse Labour of dithering, they really should sort that out.

I guess you could argue that a better regime would have seen new local gas generation producing electricity close to Auckland already, but I'm not sure if even that's true. For me, the real story is the remarkable lack of preparation, in both the public and private sectors, in a city which has been repeatedly warned of potential supply problems. Hospitals reportedly had only a couple of hours' power left when supply was restored. WTF was up with that?

For all the fevered talk about immediately setting to work on building Auckland another new substation on a parallel network, to be used when the power goes out for a few hours every five years, there simply isn't an economic case for it. And as Phill Brown of Otago University's physics department points out, it might not work anyway:

I'm not a transmission expert, but as a member of the IEEE I have a copy of their proceedings from last November, whose topic is power security (motivated by the massive 2003 power outage in the NE US and Canada). Basically I can summarise the core of the 20 odd erudite academic papers with the statement that: Power Security is HARD.

Ironically it appears that parallel networks (as seeming to be recommended by just about all media pundits) will not necessarily improve reliability due to difficult-to-control cascade effects.

Lines upgrades will probably help, but without enormous investment in huge network overcapacity (for which I don't see business offering to pay) outages such as yesterday's are likely to recur.

I also get a little miffed at the constant harping on by Auckland business people about how Auckland is the engine of the NZ economy, it really is not.

Of course you can always just not live in Auckland ...

Hey. Steady on, Southern Man. Do you really want a latte invasion?

Ann said:

I too had a lovely day - out here in the country we are more used to power outage with the added bonus of lack of water and sewage to boot - but crazily enough if it hadn't have been for the loss of bfm transmission I would not have noticed - see funnily enough on this particular storm we did not lose power .

Just one point I would like to make is that we are hearing a lot about how we must get more power to Auckland and there is a great misconception that the 400kV line from Whakamaru - Otahuhu will fix said problem - yesterdays outage is a demonstration of how this is not the answer even had the new transmission line been in existence the outage would still have occurred as all the power is sourced through Otahuhu! Transmission alone is not the answer. Try generation in and around Auckland, try and HVDC link, but another transmission line through to Otahuhu - not the answer.

Karl Woodhead said:

These things happen, even in modern civilized societies. A four-hour outage is okay - 53 days, now that's another matter (as happened in the 90s). What got me fed up with it was Susan Woods' description of Auckland as an 'apocalyptic city'. I look forward to her going to Geraldine today to view the end of society as we know it.

Friends in Auckland I've emailed got on just fine and treated it as novel. The media, though, are a bit hysterical on anything to do with Auckland. For F's sake - last week the second item on the Thursday news on both networks was a traffic jam on the way to the mall!

Sure Wellington came across as a bit precious over the sanctuary funding thing - but Alasdair Thompson and his coterie are really starting to come across as a bunch of whiners looking for a handout (and incidentally - where on earth did he come up with the $50-$100m figure?). I would think more damage would be done to the economy if power couldn't get to Bluff (and hence Tiwai Point) than to Auckland.

Auckland is a great city and deserves to be a flagship for the country. It's civic leaders need to become a bit more resilient.

Meanwhile, Paul Reynolds noted a vulnerability in the CBD that escaped attention in the news media.

I was in Wellington, hearing news from my office in Fort Street as it came to hand . The big one for us was keeping the building secure during the outage. Like dozens of others in the CBD, we have one of those fancy zapper locks on the front door of the office - people come up to it - zap the magic eye and it lets them in of a morning.

It seems to default to whatever setting it is on when the power goes down - in this case open.

We didn't know this, so when the battery backup ran out at 10am - that's what happened - the front door was defaulted to open. As the staff had all gone home by that time, Helen , my co-director was left on her own and couldn't lock the door to secure the premises.

Solution? In partnership with the lawyers next door, we paid for the hire of a security guard to make sure we were secure from walk in sneek thieves - as did dozens and dozens of other small businesses in the CBD. That's of course if you could get one - because, even at $50 an hour, they were as rare as hens' teeth

Wellington DSL was also out in the place I was staying at. who have a Telecom Xtra plan. Mobile [Vodafone] worked fine right through.

Benjamin Franzmayr had a word or two about Telecom also:

Remember a year or so ago when Telecom were running TV adverts on how reliable their system was & how there were backups of backup & generators in case those fail etc?

Well.....

Meanwhile, Steven Kempton was working at home in West Auckland, where there were not power problems and "the DSL was rocketing along at its usual piss poor speed."

Anthony Trenwith was mobile and thought - as I did - that more police officers on points duty would have been helpful.

Something must have happened to the officer who was on points duty at the Northwestern / Nelson St intersection. I drove through there at about 9am and he was there - along with another one at the Northwestern / Hobson St intersection. More officer's on points duty would have been advisable though. Only five major intersections were manned though - leaving the others to fend for themselves. You'd think that when the police swtich to crisis mode they'd let loose their desk jockeys and scoop up anything in a blue uniform to put to good use. I'm quite sure that we can do with out prosecutors, filing clerks, desk clerks and middle managers for a few hours.

Both Manukau and Auckland District Courts plus the High Court were down and out - the three busiest courts in the whole city. Their emergency power was only enough to prevent self-bludgeoning in the dark - not nearly enough for anything constructive. Manukau's natural light sources did allow for some minor matters to be dealt with but after a few hours the place was the quietest it's ever been in a work day morning. Oddly enough, the shopping centre across the road did have power and that's where most peple probably ended up.

What was most annoying though was the lack of information on what was happening, who was affected and how long it was likely to last. Auckland may get an "A" for resilience but that's offset by an "F" for communication.

Finally, I asked about what generators cost, and y'all answered. Raewyn Whyte was first in:

Generators per se are not terribly expensive. BUT you need one that will output clean power if you want to run a computer with it.

GMC Generator from Bunnings around $250 runs your beer fridge and lights, but NOT the computers nor the consumer whiteware which require surge protection (fridge, washing machine, microwave, DVD player etc.)

Honda generators which deliver clean power start at $1800.

Adam Hunt was already in there:

$90. Got mine from a pawnbroker in Panmure about a month ago, to much piss-taking from the missus.

Went and got it, plugged in the fridge and laptop (didn't need the lights), put the BBQ bottle in the emergency gas heater I keep in the garage, and generally felt very smug.

She hasn't said a word.

Yes, I am a sad bastard who doesn't trust reticulated anything ... guess it comes of a) growing up in rural England where we used to get snowed in for about a week each year and b) being in IT all my life ... I assume everything's going to break ,,, ;-)

BTW, my DSL worked right through, but I found the Vodafone network distinctly dodgy. And work had various problems (Telstra!) apparantly. What do Telstra and Vodafone have in common? They both use Unisys for their datac entres...

Couldn't believe Mary on National Radio yesterday evening: she sounded like she was implying that it wasn't good enough that neighbours should help each other out, Gummint should DO something :)

Very worried Transpower would use this as a vehicle to push their power line thing, but impressed that they haven't. But one day surely we will realise that the entire network engineering function in NZ needs a good sacking: there are far to many old pommes (who built the National Grid) over here applying their antiquated bloody 50's thinking. And they seem surprised when those of us who have a rudimentary but _up-to-date_ knowledge of the topic don't just compliantly toe the line and accept their senile recommendations.

Logix reckons you just can't sell backup power anyway:

I was in the business of providing automation services around backup generators for some years. In the end I gave it away as lousy business because no-one actually wants to spend any money on them. The only people who do a proper job of it are the hospitals who are required to do so under the Building Act.

And Trevor Hunter outlined the serious generation option:

Hey, I work for a generator installation and maintenance company. Could do you a deal on a gen to run the house, including installation for around $20,000. I think it might be a little less, but it depends on the cost of the generator. This is a super silenced set that could be run in a suburban environment with minimal noise disruption, and includes the changeover contactors that will automatically switch from mains to generator in the event of a power failure.

You just see a 15s break when the power fails, and a 1s break upon return. By adding a UPS to your office you could quite happily carry on all day and never notice the disruptions. But then how much fun would that be. Staff at one site I visited yesterday hated me for keeping their business running when everyone else was going home.

Had a manic day yesterday checking on gensets in our area - some of our mechanics were out until 8pm doing diesel deliveries and check-ups all over the CBD and suburbs.

Still, at least we got it back on by last night: my buddy in Whitecliffs in Canterbury was stuck at home with his 7 1/2 month pregnant wife, the yard buried under 2 feet of snow, with no power for 24 hours.

So no, we didn't really have the apocalypse up here …

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Baghdad on the Waitemata | Jun 13, 2006 09:20

Without a word of a lie, the last thing I was doing before the power went was looking at the Wellington webcams and cackling. Poor buggers. Look at that weather! Then the lights sputtered twice and everything went dark and quiet.

I found the transistor radio and called Wallace at bFM to say that we could still hear him (he had no idea), and then had to call him back straight away to report that the signal was now just white noise. My darling took the kids to school (where she had a meeting) and I drove down to the auto garage, where we agreed that today perhaps wasn't the day for our 10,000km service. A plainclothes police car belted down Great North Road, lights flashing behind its grille. Another police car was pulled up at the Pt Chev shops, lights going, along with an ambulance in a similar state of display. Things seemed to have become quite interesting, quite quickly.

Back home, I deduced that the whole FM radio band was out. Something wrong at the Sky Tower, presumably. I found Radio Live on the AM, but Michael Laws was saying nothing to me about my life. Called David Slack: he had power, but no DSL (turns out Telecom's network vulnerability meant even people in Christchurch were having problems). Got an overload message when I tried to call Wallace again on my mobile. It was a bit nippy indoors. And bloody quiet.

I went back out and dropped my darling into town, via a route with as few traffic lights as possible. As we drove through Cox's Bay, a dozen or more desperate punters from Jervois Road were huddling under the canopy of a mobile coffee that had suddenly appeared.

Traffic wasn't too bad. Where there were traffic lights out, people were being patient and cautious. Meanwhile, in town, alarmed-looking Chinese girls were having their little toy umbrellas blown out and people were huddling outside offices. All the cafes were shut. The downtown wind tunnel was honking.

I came back up Hobson Street, where the only intersection being controlled by a pointsman was the one the police station is on. Further up, I could see that a roadworking guy had stepped in, in his flouro orange jacket, and was directing traffic through the nasty (even when the lights are on) intersection of the northwestern motorway and Nelson Street.

On the northernwestern back out to the Chev, I saw my only episode of "lunatic" driving for the day - some fucknuckle in a RAV 4 doing about 120km/h in the wind and rain, and repeatedly dicing with the grass verge. I arrived home to discover I had a couple of refugees. Andy and Daz had been editing their skate documentary at Daz's city pad, which now had no lights, lifts or running water. They were wondering about heading further West in search of coffee, but things didn't sound too good out that way either. I was grateful I'd got my first espresso in with only minutes to spare. How thin the veneer of civilisation.

Absent coffee, we decided that a restorative measure of Talisker would be appropriate, chopped wood, lit the fire and settled down to listen to Katherine Ryan until the news, a little miffed that she was talking to some classical musician and not crossing live to the Developing Situation In Auckland.

We sat around sharing our feelings, the way guys do in a crisis, until the phone rang. It was the older boy. They'd hit their two-hour maximum without electric water reticulation and school was out at Western Springs. By the time I got round there, surprised but not unhappy kids were pouring up the street. bFM was back on the car radio, still with Wallace, broadcasting from Rick Huntington's place in Grey Lynn (how much of a radio geek do you have to be to have backup transmission power?), running a battery-powered Discman and mic into Rick's OB unit, and ordering in drinks. Rick's the man behind greylynnweather.net, which was having an interesting day too.

We came home and the boy and Daz discussed the latest X-Men movie before the phone rang again: the other boy. He didn't have to come home, but he was a bit nervous and he doesn't do singing assembly anyway, so I fetched him home too. I made some phone calls for my Listener column, which was already overdue, if only I could write the thing, let alone send it.

We thought about hauling the barbecue round into the carport and doing some snarlers, but there were only four in the freezer and the butcher was shut. But we had gas on the stove (good lord, we had backup gas - we'd have run out of food months before we ran out of heat). So I thawed out some bolognaise sauce and made a steaming mountain of spag boll for lunch. We thought it would be prudent to drink some of the beer in the fridge before it got warm.

We chopped some more wood, and the boys - who had managed to play chess without fighting - got us organised to play the headlines card game Man Bites Dog. Which is what we were doing when the lights came back on, five hours after they failed.

So everyone went back to what they were doing. I finally got hold of an APN guy, in Australia, who could speak to me. I went around to Woolworths, which was thronging with people who weren't used to being loose at that time of day, and were buying biscuits and drinks. On the way back, the friendly bloke at the Westmere Glengarrys said he'd had a rush in the morning, as people gave up on work and swung by to pick up a few beverages to wash down the barbecue food, but had been quiet since.

The buses were running and we duly settled down and had a curry. But the radio news was still telling me to turn off electrical appliances at the wall, in case a second round of high winds brought down more lines and caused surges. Like everyone was going to switch off their Sky decoders.

I understand a little more about the way the outage happened now, and it was freakish. A anti-lightning earth wire - rated for 170kmh gusts - snapped and fell into the Otahuhu substation, taking out not one but six or eight lines, which were dangerous to repair. It's not at all a trivial problem to fix. Replicating the Otahuhu substation would take years and cost very serious money.

But I'm still at a loss as to how - with all the talk about the fragility of Auckland's power supply, and that business in 1998 - only two police stations (Auckland and Avondale) had backup power. How Telecom DSL could be down all day in places which didn't even lose power. How so many Auckland residential buildings could be essentially uninhabitable because their electric water pumps stopped.

It's not really a patch on what happened at the same time in snowbound South Canterbury, let alone "Baghdad on the Waitemata", as the facetious headline above suggests. But there were around 700,000 people affected; people with small businesses and medical appointments and exams and kids being sent home from school. My day was actually quite funny, if surprisingly busy (the Herald published reader reports which made better reading than all those civic and business leaders blathering about "third world" cities).

Power blackouts aren't exactly unknown elsewhere in the world, even in great cities. And at least there weren't any riots. But a hell of a lot of things don't appear to have performed as advertised yesterday, and it would be nice to feel that some lessons have been learned. Meanwhile … how much do generators cost anyway?

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Death of the video store guy | Jun 09, 2006 10:42

The Atlantic Monthly presumably had its Zarqawi backgrounder, The Short, Violent Life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi: How a video-store clerk and small-time crook reinvented himself as America's nemesis in Iraq in the works and hauled it out in response to yesterday's happy news. It's an extremely interesting story, albeit one that lends little credence to the idea that a crucial pillar of either the insurgency or al-Qaeda has been taken out.

Nonethless, IraqPundit is understandably cheered by the news that the Jordanian who slaughtered so many Iraqis is gone. Meanwhile, Salam Pax muses on things that can get you killed, including wearing shorts and having the wrong surname:

Life seems to have lost its value and we are shutting up and shutting down because of fear. This is about how when everyone came to destroy what was wicked they killed what was good as well.

And a post this week from Riverbend also notes an accelerating process of ethnic cleansing:

According to people working and living in the area, around 15 police cars pulled up to the area and uniformed men began pulling civilians off the streets and from cars, throwing bags over their heads and herding them into the cars. Anyone who tried to object was either beaten or pulled into a car. The total number of people taken away is estimated to be around 50.

This has been happening all over Iraq- mysterious men from the Ministry of Interior rounding up civilians and taking them away. It just hasn't happened with this many people at once. The disturbing thing is that the Iraqi Ministry of Interior has denied that it had anything to do with this latest mass detention (which is the new trend with them- why get tangled up with human rights organizations about mass detentions, torture and assassinations- just deny it happened!). That isn't a good sign- it means these people will probably be discovered dead in a matter of days. We pray they'll be returned alive…

There's an ethnic cleansing in progress and it's impossible to deny. People are being killed according to their ID card. Extremists on both sides are making life impossible. Some of them work for 'Zarqawi', and the others work for the Iraqi Ministry of Interior. We hear about Shia being killed in the 'Sunni triangle' and corpses of Sunnis named 'Omar' (a Sunni name) arriving by the dozen at the Baghdad morgue. I never thought I'd actually miss the car bombs. At least a car bomb is indiscriminate. It doesn't seek you out because you're Sunni or Shia.

The heartfelt rant from Faiza (the mother of A Family in Baghdad) is compulsory reading too.

How odd that the British Home Office should be smoking crack. Well, how else would you explain its proposal to set a supply threshold for cannabis possession - five grams - that is only a third of that for pure amphetamines? If this lunatic order is adopted, Johnny English could be caught with less than a fifth of an ounce of pot, but still be theoretically liable to 14 years imprisonment for dealing.

For God's sake, there are millions of ordinary Britons who will be in possession of such a quantity once or more this year. It's a retail deal. Was it a typo or something? They might be a little closer to the mark with 50 grams.

I'm working up to a longer post about alcohol and drugs and kiddy drunks turning up to hospital, with a bit of history, but the news on how the Swiss experiment in liberalising drugs laws is settling out is interesting for now. Oh, and Boing Boing has a look at the good old days of the non-presecription Benzedrine Brand of Amphetamine Inhaler. And there's a whole gallery of images of legal highs from when they really were the shit.

No Right Turn has a reaction and a roundup on the shocking verdict in Tim Selwyn's sedition case - making particular note of silence from anyone in Parliament. You don't have to like or admire Selwyn to see this verdict as a terrible precedent, but I wonder if he made a bad call going for a jury trial. It might be that a judge would have seen off the sedition charge as the throwback it really is.

Rachael Dippie, the marketing manager of the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary was politely in touch to point out that I was wrong yesterday in saying that the sactuary supporters were "seeking a hell of a lot of money - as much as the three successful applicants put together":

To date there have been five recipients - Stadium Southland ($1m), Dunedin Chinese Gardens ($3.7m), Oparara Valley ($1.8m), Auckland Showgrounds ($4.7m) and Maungatautari Ecological Trust ($5.5m). Therefore our request of $6m wasn't out of the ballpark, with the largest application received by Internal Affairs was for $7m.

Philip Lyth was similarly polite:

Some feedback from an active (five years plus) volunteer involved with the Karori Sanctuary. Gotta differ from you on raging sense of entitlement and feckless Aucklanders - we might have to agree to differ there. When I'm on duty as a guide talking to visitors, I make sure I give credit where credit is due for places like Maungateretere and Tiritiri. Similar projects are happening all over the country.

But also we've got a world class place. It is right in the middle of the city between Karori and Brooklyn, 3 km fm Parliament, and has literally dozens of native species - kiwi, kaka, hihi (stitchbirds), saddleback, tuatara - have returned to Wellington because of the Sanctuary. The visitor and education centre is worthwhile (tho' I would say that) and the fundraising effort has been going on for some time now - the Fund money would be part of a package.

How about giving sanctuary.org.nz a plug?

There's a torrent for Jonathan Freedland's interesting interview with Al Gore, about Gore's global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth. (There's also a Mininova torrent alleged to be the movie itself, but it's bogus.)

Anyway, I have a lot of work to do today (and then I'm on The Panel with me old mucker Richard Langston) before I can down tools and head off to the D4's farewell gig, then spend the rest of the weekend watching sport.

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