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Feb 29, 2008 5:43 pm US/Eastern
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FPL Says "Human Error" Caused Power Outage
Engineer Placed Under Suspension, According To FPL President
MIAMI (CBS4) ―
While still preliminary, the results of an investigation by FPL revealed on Friday that human error was the primary factor immediately responsible for the power outage.
FPL in a statement wrote a "field engineer was diagnosing a switch that had malfunctioned at FPL's Flagler substation in west Miami. Without authorization, the engineer disabled two levels of relay protection. This was done contrary to FPL's standard procedures and established practices," according to the statement. "Standard procedures do not permit the simultaneous removal of both levels of protection." It went on to say that because both levels of relay protection had been removed, an outage ultimately affected 26 transmission lines and 38 substations. One of the substations affected serves three of the generation units at Turkey Point, including a natural gas unit as well as both nuclear units, which, as designed, automatically and safely shut. Also affected were two other generation plants in FPL's system.
The final count of customers affected totaled 584,000 customers, or 13 percent of FPL's consumers. Of those, 66 percent had power restored within an hour, 90 percent within two hours and virtually all customers whose service was affected by this event had service restored by 4:30 p.m.
FPL and the federal government are doing further investigations in what led to Tuesday's incident, which touched off the chain reaction in the power grid.
FPL said the problem at the substation should not have brought down the power grid, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission wants to know if there were any violations of federal reliability rules governing the nationwide power grid.
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday the outage prompted federal regulators into the first investigation of its kind. It's one in which energy regulators can impose up to one-million dollar fines per violation if they find breaches of new reliability rules put in place after the huge blackout in the northeast in 2003.
FPL President Armando Olivera apologized for the incident in a conference Friday afternoon, also saying that the engineer has been placed "under suspension".
What did work, as it was designed, the utility says, was the safeguard system, which kept the sudden loss of power on the grid from spreading farther and wider and lasting much longer. Other power plants came online to make up for lost power, and within four hours virtually everyone had their lights back on.
The problem started shortly after 1 p.m. Tuesday as South Florida experienced heavy rain, but it was not immediately known if the weather was a contributing factor.
People near the substation, located near FPL's Miami offices, said they heard an explosion before the power died. A fire was reported at the substation afterward.
Apparently equipment meant to regulate the voltage at the substation failed, and the system that is put in place to isolate the problem failed to disconnect the substation from the rest of the system. FPL engineers are studying every element in its system for answers.
FPL told CBS4's Michael Williams that problem caused FPL officials to shut down two nuclear generators at Turkey Point, on Biscayne Bay east of Homestead, placing them out of service.
Once those units shut down, experts say that apparently left FPL without enough power to meet demand on a day when South Florida was flirting with record high temperatures, and that demand may have combined with the generator shutdown to black out customers across a large part of the state.
The problem disabled two major distribution lines, which stretch from South Florida to Daytona Beach.
FPL said that not all customers lost power at once, but that at the height of the outage, about 700,000 people were without power in FPL's service area, stretching from South Miami-Dade to Palm Beach County. About 3 million people in Florida were without power at some time during the afternoon.
Utility customers in parts of more than 30 counties experienced problems because they are interconnected with FPL's grid.
The blackout caused schools in Miami-Dade County to keep students in their classroom, halted service on Metrorail and Metromover, and sent traffic into confusion when hundreds of traffic signals were darkened by the outage.
As power slowly returned to parts of the region, students were allowed to leave schools, traffic lights returned to service, and train service resumed. Only a few Broward County schools were without power, but a similar lockdown was not in effect there.
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