Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Florida power outages caused by nuke plant shutdown

A "significant equipment failure'' at an electric substation in West Miami-Dade County Tuesday afternoon caused a nearby nuclear reactor to shutdown, triggering waves of power outages from Key West as far north as Daytona Beach and Tampa.

A spokesman for Florida Power & Light said the problems and subsequent shutdown at the Turkey Point reactor were done automatically for safety reasons. Spokeswoman Aletha Player estimated 700,000 customers were affected, adding that most will have power restored no later than 5:30 p.m.

"This is not a routine event, it's not routine at all,'' Player said at a 4 p.m. press conference at the Miami-Dade Emergency Operations Center. "We are still investigating ... we don't have all the details of what caused (the outage).''

Well thanks pal for telling us what we already knew. Namely the fact that but of course you don't know what happened. That's pretty much the standard reply, "um, gee, beats me!" whenever something like this goes down.

Tell you one thing though, the lights were off at major intersections here and traffic never moved so well. After hours of progressing nicely they finally sent car-stoppers out to man the intersections and then things went back to being as screwed up as they normally are.

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