The Blackout of
2003
Costs,
Comparisons, and Clues to Downtime Prevention
Thursday, August 14, 2003, 4PM EST - A cascading
power failure occurs in eight U.S. states and one Canadian
province. At last count, according to the Wall Street
Journal, estimated costs due to the blackout total
approximately $6 billion.
An
estimated 50 million people in New York, Michigan, Ohio, New
Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Ontario province in Canada,
and neighboring areas lost power for nearly 30 hours.
The costs
to New York City, the most heavily populated city in the
United States, totaled about $1.05 billion, or about $10,000
for each second of the outage, according to the NYC
Comptroller’s office. Nearly $800 million of lost economic
transactions and $250 million of ruined perishable goods make
up the total.
Doomed to Repeat?
New
York City itself is no stranger to power outages. Some have
been recent:
July 6, 1999 – A blackout in the
Washington Heights section of the city leaves 200,000 people
above 155th St. without power for nearly 19 hours during a
heat wave.
One
particular 1965 blackout shares multiple similarities with
this latest outage, leaving many to wonder what corrective,
preventative actions have taken place over the past three
decades.
November 9, 1965 – Over 80,000
square miles of the Northeast United States and Ontario,
Canada lose power, affecting 30 million people.
Coast to Coast
Although the causes were vastly different, the recent
Northeast outages have echoed those experienced in recent
years on the West Coast in both scope and associated costs.
December 8, 1998 - A widespread
power outage leaves nearly one million people in the San
Francisco area without power, some for the entire workday.
January, 2001 - California
Independent System Operator (ISO) orders rolling blackouts on
seven days and declares 30 Stage 3 emergencies due to low
power supplies. Many Silicon Valley manufacturers were
affected.
According to a Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group (http://www.svmg.org)
press release, “Two-thirds of Silicon Valley Manufacturing
Group (SVMG) member company respondents were directly impacted
by the rolling blackouts. The average blackout lasted 90
minutes in duration. More than 100,000 workers at SVMG
companies were left idle. Immediate financial losses for
Silicon Valley (were) estimated at the tens of millions of
dollars, accounting for major effects like employee downtime,
lost product and data, and the expense of retooling
equipment."
According to a national survey conducted for Iomega
Corporation (http://www.iomega.com) in 2001 by Bruskin
Research, 57 percent of the Californian computer users
surveyed fear loss of computer content due to a blackout or
power failure. The survey indicates that 45 percent of
computer users nationwide are concerned with losing data due
to power problems.
The Price to Pay
Average
downtime-related costs are different between various
industries. An hour of downtime for one sector may range in
hundreds of thousands of dollars, while at the high end of the
scale can cost into the millions.
[source: Network
Computing
(http://www.networkcomputing.com),
March 5, 2001]
and
[source: META Group, Inc.,"Quantifying
Performance Loss: IT Performance Engineering and Measurement
Strategies", November 22, 2000. Clients of META Group, Inc.
can read the full Delta Summary here:
http://www.metagroup.com/cgi-bin/inetcgi/jsp/displayArticle.do?oid=18750
]
Get Legendary
Reliability® For Your Electronics
Talk to
us at R Solution Inc. APC has the availability solutions
you need to help ensure you stay up and running through any
power-related problem, from surges and spikes to sags and
blackouts.
article source:
www.apcc.com
