Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Why it's taking so long to restore power after Sandy


By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, Mashable
Daily News Article

This news article,"Why it's taking so long to restore power after Sandy," is about how it is taking a long time to bring back power in the Northeastern coast of the United States after Sandy came. There are major power outages in lower Manhattan from 30th street down to the tip of the island and in New Jersey. Hurricane Sandy was one of the worst storms that the Northeast has ever encountered and it damaged the whole electrical grid.

"The severity of the storm hit us so bad that it really took a beating on both our underground and overhead systems." Said Alfonso Quiroz, a Con Edison Spokesman.

"Each circuit has to be checked to make sure it's in good shape." According to Sakis Meliopoulos, a professor of electrical energy.

Sandy's winds knocked out trees and overhead power lines, and the water flooded underground substations. 930,000 customers had no power within the last couple of days due to "the most devastating storm in company history," as Con Edison referred to it.

In New york, Hurricane Sandy knocked out distribution lines, flooded basements that held backup generators, and transformers, and overwhelmed underground substations and subway lines, which sometimes held electrical cables. Sandy even cause some of the transformers to explode.
In Manhattan, the flooding of the substations are seemingly the problem. Technicians have to pump out the water and then clean all the equipment to get rid of the salt water before drying them. 
"If you re-energize the system without cleaning, you could cause more widespread damage," says Vijay Vittal, a professor of electrical engineering at Arizona State University.
After all the cleaning and drying, some of the equipment might have to be replaced or fixed. And then, it needs to be tested and checked before using them again.

My thoughts on this article is why are the engineers taking so long to fix the problem. It been a little over a month since Sandy hit and their still not done? I hope that everything goes back to normal and they fix them properly and hopefully there will not be any more severe storms coming in a long time. They have their work cut out for them and the faster they get it done, the faster things will go back to usual.

http://www.studentnewsdaily.com/daily-news-article/why-its-taking-so-long-to-restore-power-after-sandy/

1 comment:

  1. Azyana,
    Too much of your post is copied and pasted from the original article. Your summary should be in your own words. If you use more than three words from the article, these words must be put in quotation marks.

    Your parts 3 and 4 are too short.

    50

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