Power outages hit Flordia by Claudia Sonea

A Romanian proverb says "the country is burning and the old brushes herself", that is the problem of Florida's authorities that cannot decide what really caused Tuesday's outages. The opinions are divided into those who blame Florida's electrical grid and those who think that mostly the bad weather caused all the chain of misfortunes. The main issue was that a nuclear plant automatically shut down on Tuesday, cutting power to up to 3 million people from Daytona Beach through the Florida Keys. There were no safety concerns and although many areas were hit hard, the outages were short lived and only about 20,000 people lacked electricity during the evening commute home. Still traffic was the one most affected, in the Miami area many stop lights being left briefly without power. Another problem was created by an equipment malfunction in a substation near Miami disabling two power distribution lines between Miami and Daytona Beach, and in response, Florida Power & Light's Turkey Point nuclear plant south of Miami stopped operating around 1 p.m., according to Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Kenneth Clark. The company however suspects something more because such equipment failure should not have caused the widespread blackouts. Dick Winn believes that the grid problems caused both Turkey Point reactors to shut down and are responsible for the entire mess and agreeing with Homeland Security Department spokeswoman Laura Keehner the outages are far from being connected to terrorism and it is not even an act of vandalism like that from March 2006 when tiny hole was found in a coolant pipe at the plant. The federal nuclear commission says the causes are not yet known and the initial drop in voltage from outside Turkey Point was worsened by the two reactors shut down that according to Florida emergency management officials cut power to about 2-3 million people. Everyone expects now for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, responsible for electricity grid reliability, to find out if there were any violations of federal grid reliability rules. Miami and the southeast portion of the state were the areas where the outages were more concentrated, but were also reported in the southwestern and northeastern parts of the state determining several hospitals to switch to backup generators and schools were scheduled to be dismissed on time. Otherwise everything went like nothing has ever happened: Miami International Airport, the Port of At the most the outage lasted for a couple of hours and it did not make anyone restless, nor created panic. These things happen, but authorities are prompt in action and that makes people sleep better at nigh. Isn't it true?

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080226/ap_on_re_us/florida_outages;_ylt=AgPSysFfv23whi4LypHGwqus0NUE

by Claudia Sonea for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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