On Wed, 10 Sep 2003 15:17:25 +0100, Sam Holloway wrote:

On Wed, 10 Sep 2003 15:11:48 +0100, Wanderer wrote:
On Wed, 10 Sep 2003 14:03:12 +0100, Roland Perry wrote:
In message , Cast_Iron
writes
According to the report, the second fault occurred because automatic
protection equipment shut off the power thinking there was a fault with the
supply, because of the action taken to compensate for the defective
transformer.


Finally! Confirmation that the two faults were indeed related. As some of
us insisted (against solid opposition) from the start.

Not quite true. You conveniently snipped the *real* reason, which was
almost certainly human error. ... The key phrase is perfectly clear and
obvious, at least to anyone with a knowledge of the industry - "an
incorrect protection relay was installed when old equipment was replaced in
2001".


But triggered by the first fault, no? If the first fault hadn't occured,
neither would the second one (at that particular time).


I guess it all depeneds on how you want to define the chain of
cause-and-effect...

Or whether a member of the public would consider a protection
malfunction to be a genuine fault, in quite the same way that they would
seeing a bloody great hole blown in a cable or a transformer on fire.

Certainly for the purposes of the National Fault reporting scheme it
would be classed as a fault, but the implications in this particular
case are quite far-reaching. If, in the final analysis it can be proven
beyond all reasonable doubt that the outage happened because of
negligence, which seems highly likely, then National Grid could be
liable for substantial damages. Might be time to dispose of the
shares...