That rumor turns out to not be true. But it is a fact that, whenever disaster strikes, it becomes difficult to reach the people you care about. Right at the moment when you really need to hear a familiar voice, you often can't. So what gives?

To find out why it's frequently so difficult to successfully place a call during emergencies, I spoke with Brough Turner, an entrepreneur, engineer, and writer who has been been working with phone systems (both wired and wireless) for 25 years. Turner helped me understand how the behind-the-scenes infrastructure of cell phones works, and why that infrastructure gets bogged down when lots of people are suddenly trying to make calls all at once from a single place. He says there are some things that can be done to fix this issue, but, ultimately, it's more complicated than just asking what the technology can and cannot do. In some ways, service failures like this are a price we pay for having a choice and not being subject to a total monopoly.

Brough Turner: Well, say you'd have an earthquake in California. This was for the old Bell system. The national long distance routing has a set of standard, predefined routes and it had network control centers in New Jersey and other places. Things would get overloaded and they would manually intervene by putting access restrictions on new calls coming into the area that was congested. In the 60s, 70s, and 80s they would let through one out of every five call attempts. They were doing that manually and just arbitrarily to reduce congestion. Over time things got more automated. During the long-distance competition of the 1990s, AT&T introduced computerized routing and started using automated rate limiting. It all really got quite sophisticated before the whole industry went away.

BT: First off, different cell phone providers use different technologies, different systems. I'm talking about the GSM system used by AT&T and T-Mobile. I know less about the Qualcomm version that's used by Verizon and Sprint. They evolved in different ways and the details are different, but the same basic principles are the same for all. With 4G, by the way, that's changing. Everybody is converging on the technology that comes from that GSM tradition.

In general, though, there are a bunch of different places where congestion can happen. Networks consist of different technologies, and different levels. You start with the mobile switching center that may cover a large area. There are only one or two mobile switches for Eastern Massachusetts. We're talking about a room full of racks, full of computers and other switching elements. The densest switch is in China, and they have something that will serve more than several million customers at a time.

So you have the mobile switching center. Then you have groups referred to as radio node controllers. There are dozens to hundreds of these conrolled by one switch. They're located closer to the radios and they deal with handoffs between different radios.

Then, of course, you have the individual radios and that's where you see antennas on top of and on sides of buildings. Those are everywhere. Each of those is a cell, and in each cell you have users who are connected to the network.

BT: Yup. The other thing about the radios is that they have different sizes of cells. You've got regular cells and then smaller sub-cells. You also have larger overlay macro-cells that are really big. They try to handle you within the small cell you're closest to. But it's a trade off between capacity — they'd like to have lots of small cells for that — and coverage — they don't want to put 100k small cells everywhere. So you might have a cell that covers a mile ara and then smaller cells within that that handle most of the traffic.

Interesting thing is that most people are actually stationary, sitting on their butts. For most people, calls originate from one or two locations and they stay there the whole time. But we have to have this incredibly complicated system to deal with the 5-8% of people who move around. Maybe less than that.

BT:They can offload some of that to a macro-cell. When it's a planned event — the Boston Marathon, for instance, before the bombings — they can bring in aditional mobile cells. They park little trucks around the edge of the event. All those radios, though, have to connect back to the radio network controller. If it's an installed radio it's probably a wired connection — copper or fiber. But when you can't get that, then they use point-to-point wireless. Either way, they call that the backhaul.

In different parts of the system different things will get congested. In some cases, the specific cell site might be overloaded and macros are also overloaded. In other cases, it's the backhaul that gets overloaded. And that doesn't even have to be an emergency to cause that. There's this great story where [telecommunications expert] David Reed was driving from New York to Boston in the middle of the night. His wife was driving and he was sitting there with one of the first iPads that had 3G service, and has they drove through Connecticut he was running speed tests along the way. Just to see the different responses in different cells. And at one point, he was limited to, like, 3 mbps. It was 3:00 am, so it wasn't about lots of people using the system. It was just that he was driving through a cell where the only backhaul was two T1 lines. So 3 mbps was the maximum anybody in that cell could ever get. And this was like a 20 mile stretch of highway.

BT: There are a bunch of separate channels in the wireless system. But the big division is between a control channel and all of these traffic carrying channels. Control channels are used for a lot of different things. For instance, they're used for call set-up and call tear-down. Your handset looks on a particular control channel for permission to make a request. It uses the control channel to request to make a call, like, "I need enough capacity to set up call," so then the system can find the traffic channel with enough free space. But they're also used for sms messages. Which is interesting.

BT: Yes. It's much better. The SMS messages have a relatively light footprint, first of all. The second thing is that they're asynchronous. If they can't get through this instant, they keep trying. If it gets over the radio to the cell site, it will get through. Even if it's delayed for 30 seconds or something. With voice you're either connected or you're not, and when you are that means that the traffic channel is tied up until you're done talking. More likely, it means you never get connected because traffic channels are already saturated.

BT: Yes. Now this is a piece where I know what equipment these large carriers have, but I don't know how they've chosen to implement capabilities that are there. So one way they can do this is they can bar new traffic being originated by people based on "class". There are typically 10 classes for regular subscribers and another six classes that handle things like 911 calls and emergency services. They can control which classes have access at the level of cells, or by groups of cells, or all of Eastern Massachusetts if they wish.

I'm not clear on how automated all of this is. They definitely have the ability to have it totally automated. There's technology you can buy from Ericsson that features call-load-triggered access class barring, so it automatically invokes certain policies about who can place calls in an area if the traffic there exceeds a pre-determined threshold. But that's an extra feature and you have to pay extra for it ... I guarantee it's in the range of 10s of thousands of dollars per mobile switch. So who knows what decision the carriers made about that. It might have been automated and it might not be.

What I am sure of is that they set up priorities for people with fire and safety access classes. And I think it's also clear that the Verizon mobile switching center was overloaded on Monday. The effect I observed in Massachusetts was you could not place a call from a landline into the Verizon mobile network for some period of time. They blocked all incoming calls for some period of time. But within the network [Verizon to Verizon] some number of calls were getting through. I didn't succeed, but some friends did after trying for 5 or 10 minutes. In overload cases they won't turn off everything. They'll say fire and safety get through immediately and maybe 10% of the other calls get to go through. They don't throttle down to zero, though, because you don't know if somebody desperately needs to make that connection.

BT: In the end, it does come down to trade-offs. That's true of any network. You're interested in coverage first and then capacity. If you wanted to guarantee that a network never had an outage your capital investment would have to go up orders of magnitude beyond anything that is rational. So each network is trying to invest their budget in ways that make network appear to perform better.

The cost of providing temporary extra capacity for the Boston Marathon, that's something that's in the budget and they plan for that event. But when you get something unexpected like a terrorist event, or an earthquake, or damage from a hurricane or tornado, then you have trade offs between capital and how robust your network is. Every time you have an event people say, "Oh, they didn't invest enough." But you look at New York City after Hurricane Sandy and Southern Manhattan was under 6 feet of water — all the buried infrastructure was lost. Meanwhile, in other places, a significant number of cell sites were knocked out because connections ran on overhead poles and got knocked down by trees. The antenna site literally got destroyed. Interestingly, you can lose 30% of your cells and stil get coverage. Coverage was there in New Jersey after Sandy, even with 1/3 of the network out. The catch is there wasn't much capacity.

BT: I honestly don't know how you could regulate it to work the way you wanted it to all the time. Reliability on the old Bell system was relatively high ... and we paid the a high price for that as consumers because to get that level of service they got to be a monopoly and they got to charge us a rate that allowed them to make a return on their investments.

With cellular systems, competition seems to drive more optimal decisions. We don't have as much competition as we used to, but there's still some. You really want at least four-to-six carriers, and most places it's really only like three or three-and-a-half. For the public, we have to have a trade-off between getting coverage we want and being stuck with a monopoly. You look at electricity or fixed-line phone systems, and there are regulations on those industries about how much coverage and capacity they have to have because it has to be a good system — you as the consumer have no other choice. They're monopolies.

A meteor has exploded over Chelyabinsk , a remote part of Russia 150km north of Kazahstan. The meteor's descent was captured by many video cameras (largely the ubiquitous Russian dashboard cams, it seems). There are no reports of deaths, but apparently there are now 400 reported injuries. At least one large building, a zinc factory, had its roof demolished by the explosion.

A witness in Chelyabinsk reported hearing a huge blast early in the morning and feeling a shockwave in a 19-storey building in the town centre.

The sounds of car alarms and breaking windows could be heard in the area, the witness said, and mobile phones were working intermittently. "Preliminary indications are that it was a meteorite rain," an emergency official told RIA-Novosti. "We have information about a blast at 10,000-metre altitude. It is being verified."

"I was driving to work, it was quite dark, but it suddenly became as bright as if it was day," said Viktor Prokofiev, a 36-year-old resident of Yekaterinburg in the Urals mountains.

"I felt like I was blinded by headlights," he told Reuters.

Meteorite explosion over Russia injures hundreds [The Guardian] ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/02/15/meteor-explodes-over-russia.html/feed 98 http://boingboing.net/2012/12/27/the-horrors-of-an-avalanche-a.html http://boingboing.net/2012/12/27/the-horrors-of-an-avalanche-a.html#comments Thu, 27 Dec 2012 17:51:35 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=202991

Now this is how you do multimedia.

At The New York Times, John Branch tells the amazing, terrifying story of 16 backcountry skiers and snowboarders caught in an avalanche in the Cascade mountains in February 2012. The article, by itself, is a must-read. But you should also take a look at the absolutely fantastic way that Branch and his editors put the online medium to good use — embedding interactive maps, photos that move like something out of Harry Potter, and more standard videos into a lovely, fluid design.

Alissa Walker, who pointed me toward this piece, said that she felt cold just reading it. And you really do get that feeling. All the elements of Branch's article are brought together in a way that enhances the urgency and amplifies your sense of experiencing somebody else's story. It's really, really, really fantastic.

Read the full story at The New York Times

We have this idea that physical crowds are stupid herds. Give them half a chance, and they'll form a stampeding riot mob driven by emotion. Look at history, though, and you'll see many examples of large groups of people being perfectly well-behaved. In fact, in disaster situations, like on 9/11, crowds can even organize themselves in practical ways to help others to safety.

Meanwhile, we tend to talk about virtual crowds — the kind that form online, or between physically distant members of a professional community — as smart. But if that's always true, why do these groups get caught up in financial bubbles and why isn't Twitter a more reliable place to pick up breaking news?

Physical crowds and virtual crowds are different things. But our stereotypes about them stem from a common problem. In both cases, we tend to treat "the crowd" as if it's a distinct entity — as if, at some point, individuals in a group stop being themselves and start to become limbs of a crowd creature. In my latest column for The New York Times magazine, I learned that that's not the way people work in real life. As Clark McPhail, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me, "Crowds don't have a central nervous system."

Gustave Le Bon was one of the first people to write about crowds as entities separate from the people in them. His 1895 book, “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind,” shaped academic discussions of human gatherings for half a century and encouraged 20th-century fascist dictators, including Benito Mussolini, to treat crowds as emotional organisms — something to be manipulated and controlled. (Perhaps a Le Bonian understanding of crowds makes us feel more comfortable about the atrocities of the 20th century.) But “The Crowd” was more a work of philosophy than of science, McPhail told me. Le Bon’s ideas were based on armchair analysis of past events, not on carefully documented studies of crowds in action. In the 1960s, sociologists began to study protests and public gatherings, and they realized that the things they believed about crowd behavior didn’t align with what took place in the real world.

Read the rest of the story

Image: Crowd, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from jamescridland's photostream

This image, made using a laser mapping technology called LIDAR, was taken on September 17, 2001. It shows a 3-D model of the rubble left behind in lower Manhattan following the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Minnesota Public Radio's Paul Tosto has a really interesting peek into the way mapping techniques like LIDAR were used to help rescuers and clean-up crew understand the extent of the damage, look for survivors, and rehabilitate the area around the disaster zone.

The Library of Congress work also includes data from a a thermal sensor flown at 5,000 feet over Ground Zero that provided images to track underground fires that burned for weeks at the site.

It's worth remembering that Google Earth didn't exist back then. The ancient science of cartography has been reborn with the technology of the last decade. Let's hope it's not called on again to map destruction.

See more at the MPR News Cut blog

Via Peter Aldhous

On February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke up in the sky over Texas, bits and pieces falling onto at least two states. All seven astronauts on board died. As we close in on the 10-year anniversary of the disaster, you can expect lots of media outlets and experts to start offering their take on what happened and what we've learned from it. But there's one voice that you should really be listening to ... and he's speaking already.

Wayne Hale was a flight director on the space shuttle for 40 or 41 missions (His blog says 40, his NASA bio says 41). Flight controllers are the people who manage a space flight—they deal with the logistics, monitor all the various systems of the vehicle, make the decision to launch or abort, and deal with trouble-shooting. In other words, they play a key role in safety, and the flight director is the person in charge of all the flight controllers.

More importantly, Wayne Hale is one of the people who suspected something might be wrong with Columbia before its fatal reentry, and tried to get his superiors at NASA to pay attention to the risks. Here's Dwayne Day writing at The Space Review:

During the Columbia accident investigation I was one of over 100 staff members who worked for the CAIB (not all of them worked simultaneously, and for the many months I was there, the staff probably numbered no more than 50–60). There were so many aspects to the investigation that it was impossible to follow them all, and my responsibility was for policy, history, and budget, and later, some of the issues concerning schedule pressure. But I remember one afternoon when I was talking with an Air Force colonel skilled in aircraft accident investigations when Hale’s name came up and I asked how Hale had been involved in the accident. The colonel explained how Hale had been one of the people who had been concerned about the foam strike during the flight and had tried to obtain on-orbit imagery of the orbiter during its mission, only to be rebuffed by upper level managers. Then, after a short pause, the colonel added: “Hale was one of the good guys.”

But being one of the good guys doesn't mean you don't feel guilty when something goes horribly wrong. On Tuesday, Hale posted on his blog about the Columbia disaster and what is going on in his head as the anniversary creeps closer. It's a sad, poignant post, and Hale promises it's just the beginning of a series of articles addressing his experiences before, during, and after the Challenger disaster:

All of this has brought the searing memories from a decade ago into the forefront of my mind. Not that those memories has ever left me; the memories of early 2003. I was intimately involved in the events leading up to the Columbia tragedy so maybe that is to be expected. But often in the wee hours of the morning when sleep fails, the questions return: why did it happen, how did we allow it to happen, and what could I have done to prevent it.

Some others who lived through those days remember things from different perspectives, they had different experiences, but – somewhat frighteningly – remember events we shared in common in different ways. The passage of time, too, is riddling my memories with holes like Swiss cheese. Names escape me, details are getting fuzzy, and though concentrated thought can bring some things back from the recesses, others are gone forever. Some memories stand out like a lightning bolt in a dark night; many others of those events are gone into the darkness. If I am ever to write down my experience, the time is now.

Basically, you should bookmark Wayne Hale's blog and check it frequently. He'll be posting regularly, over the next several months, and I'm am certain you'll want to read the full series.

Also read: The Space Review article that mentions Hale's role in the Columbia disaster.

It began with a few small mistakes.

Around 12:15, on the afternoon of August 14, 2003, a software program that helps monitor how well the electric grid is working in the American Midwest shut itself down after after it started getting incorrect input data. The problem was quickly fixed. But nobody turned the program back on again.

A little over an hour later, one of the six coal-fired generators at the Eastlake Power Plant in Ohio shut down. An hour after that, the alarm and monitoring system in the control room of one of the nation’s largest electric conglomerates failed. It, too, was left turned off.

Those three unrelated things—two faulty monitoring programs and one generator outage—weren’t catastrophic, in and of themselves. But they would eventually help create one of the most widespread blackouts in history. By 4:15 pm, 256 power plants were offline and 55 million people in eight states and Canada were in the dark. The Northeast Blackout of 2003 ended up costing us between $4 billion and $10 billion. That’s “billion”, with a “B”.

But this is about more than mere bad luck. The real causes of the 2003 blackout were fixable problems, and the good news is that, since then, we’ve made great strides in fixing them. The bad news, say some grid experts, is that we’re still not doing a great job of preparing our electric infrastructure for the future.

Let’s get one thing out of the way right up front: The North American electric grid is not one bad day away from the kind of catastrophic failures we saw in India this week. I’ve heard a lot of people speculating on this, but the folks who know the grid say that, while such a huge blackout is theoretically possible, it is also extremely unlikely. As Clark Gellings, a fellow at the Electric Power Research Institute put it, “An engineer will never say never,” but you should definitely not assume anything resembling an imminent threat at that scale. Remember, the blackouts this week cut power to half of all Indian electricity customers. Even the 2003 blackout—the largest blackout in North America ever—only affected about 15% of Americans.

We don’t know yet what, exactly, caused the Indian blackouts, but there are several key differences between their grid and our grid. India’s electricity is only weakly tied to the people who use it, Gellings told me. Most of the power plants are in the far north. Most of the population is in the far south. The power lines linking the two are neither robust nor numerous. That’s not a problem we have in North America.

Likewise, India has considerably more demand for electricity than it has supply. Even on a good day, there’s not enough electricity for all the people who want it, said Jeff Dagle, an engineer with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Advanced Power and Energy Systems research group. “They’re pushing their system much harder, to its limits,” he said. “If they have a problem, there’s less cushion to absorb it. Our system has rules that prevent us from dipping into our electric reserves on a day-to-day basis. So we have reserve power for emergencies.”

None of this means the North American grid is a perfect, or even an ideal, system. The electric grids that exist today evolved, they weren’t designed by anybody. Every electric grid on Earth is flawed, but they’re all flawed in different ways. So we can talk about serious problems with the North American grid—but that doesn’t mean that you should be stocking up on home generators and canned peas in preparation for an India-like event. The scale is different, and the problems are different, too.

So what did cause the 2003 blackout? There were a couple key issues, but at least one is likely to surprise you. First Energy, the conglomerate that owned both the broken generator and the failed alarm system, had also been lax on trimming trees near their power lines. It’s an amazingly simple, non-techy, problem, but it mattered.

I like to say that the grid is a lot like a lazy river at a waterpark. It’s not a line, it’s a loop—power plants connected to customers and back to power plants again. And like the lazy river, it has to operate within certain parameters. The electricity has to move at a constant speed (an analogy for what the engineers call frequency) and it has to flow at a constant depth (analogous to voltage). In order to maintain that constant speed and constant depth, you have to also maintain an almost perfect balance between supply and demand … everywhere, at all times. So when one generator goes out, the electricity it was supplying has to come from someplace else. Like a stream flowing into a new channel, the load will shift from one group of transmission lines to another.

But, the more electricity you run along a power line, the hotter the power line gets. And the hotter it gets, the more it droops, like a basset hound in a heat wave. If nearby trees aren’t trimmed, the lines can slump too close to the branches—which creates a short circuit. When that happens, the loads have to shift again. All of this disrupts the speed and the depth on the river of electrons. The more lines you lose, the more likely it is that the remaining lines will, themselves, droop into something. The more lines that short, the more power plants have to shut down to protect themselves from fluctuations in frequency and voltage. The more times you have to shift load around, the more the grid starts to get away from you. In 2003, six transmission lines went down in a row, several of them major channels for the flow of electricity. Those losses were what turned a small series of mistakes into a catastrophe.

Even more important than the untrimmed trees, though, was the lack of communication.

The North American electric grid is a patchwork quilt, not a single entity. It’s made up of chunks controlled by different—and often competing—utility companies. Those chunks are aggregated into management districts. In the case of the Eastern part of the continent, all of the management districts are aggregated into a larger joint district. There are a lot of hands working to make sure the grid operates the way it should. But those hands don’t always know what the others are doing, at least not fast enough.

The issue is something that grid experts call situational awareness—basically, the big picture. In 2003, the people trying to stop the blackout didn’t have a clear view of it. Partly, that had to do with the faulty software program that wasn’t turned back on and the alarm system failure that apparently went unnoticed. But it was also just how the grid worked. The systems in place to tell grid controllers what the electrons were doing moved a lot more slowly than the electrons themselves.

In 2003, it took about 30 seconds for data about what was happening on the grid to be gathered, compiled, analyzed, and displayed in a way that grid controllers could use. That sounds pretty fast, until you consider the fact that changes on the grid happen much, much faster***. If a power plant goes offline in Arizona, it can create a measurable effect in Canada in about a second. If your view of the grid is updated only every 30 seconds, you miss important details. After the 2003 blackout, grid experts went back and essentially replayed the whole thing in a computer modeling program. The idea was to try to get a better idea of where things went wrong and how a similar event could be prevented in the future. They found that, about an hour before the blackout, the grid was showing signs of stress that controllers didn’t see at the time, said Carl Imhoff, manager of the Energy and Environment Sector at PNNL. It wasn’t the controllers’ fault. They simply didn’t have the technology to see the big picture.

Today, that technology exists. Phasor Measurement Units are kind of the opposite of sexy. Also known as PMUs, they’re just anonymous little boxes that sit on server racks in electrical substations. But phasors are linked into transmission lines. They see what’s happening on the line—how well supply and demand are balanced, whether voltage and frequency are stable and within the normal range. That’s just one point of data, recorded in one place. But a network of phasors can tell you a lot. It can show you, for instance, if the stability of the grid is changing as electricity moves from Cleveland to Columbus. And the phasors process that information far more quickly. Today, our grid can give controllers information about the big picture in less than 10 seconds. Researchers like Massoud Amin are working on getting that response time down to fewer than 3 seconds.

If we’d had a phasor network in 2003, grid controllers would have had that hour warning about the problem. There’s a good chance they’d have been able to fix it, or, at least, make the resulting blackout smaller and more localized.

When it comes to PMUs, 2003 was really a wake-up call. It led utilities and the government to team up to install a true phasor network throughout the United States. That effort is currently ongoing. In 2009 there were maybe 200 phasors in operation. By the end of 2013, there will be more than 1000 installed throughout this country. Over the last five years a partnership between federal Recovery Act funds and private industry dollars has invested $7.8 billion in upgrading the grid, Massoud Amin said.

The problem, he added, is that this isn’t nearly enough.

Our grid is old. The average substation transformer is 42 years old—two years older than the designed lifespan of a substation transformer. For the most part, our grid hasn’t been modernized—it’s largely mechanical equipment operating a digital world, Clark Gellings said. Perhaps most importantly, the grid isn’t being prepared for the future.

”From 1995-2000, the electricity sector put less than ⅓ of 1% of net sales into research and development,” Massoud Amin said. “In the following six years, that number dropped to less than 2/10 of 1%. We are harvesting the existing infrastructure more and investing less and less in the future.”

Phasor networks are a success story in the making. So are new national rules Gellings told me about, which put a much higher penalty on utility companies that don’t keep their trees trimmed. One untrimmed tree can cost $1 million in fines. All of this will help prevent blackouts of the size we had in 2003. But it doesn’t help deal with what’s coming 20-30 years down the road.

It’s not just that the infrastructure itself will eventually age out. Where we get electricity from, who uses it, and how much we use is all changing. In the future, we’re going to have more electricity production happening in the rural Midwest, where wind resources are most abundant, but the people will still live far away. We keep using more electricity, in general, and we’re more dependent on it now. We’re only going to become more dependent in the future. Jeff Dagle told me that improvements are being made, but they might not be moving fast enough if there’s a major change in energy use—for instance, if Americans start buying electric cars at higher rates than they do today.

The frustrating thing is that this isn’t simply a technology problem. It’s also social and political. Just like the national grid is really a patchwork of grids, it’s also a patchwork of regulatory systems. That uncoordinated mixture of regulation and de-regulation often fails to incentivize the investments the grid actually needs. Building transmission lines, for instance, is a job that crosses multiple states. Many of those states aren’t going to get a direct benefit from the line, even if that’s what’s best on the whole. Local regulators may understand that, but when they have to operate in the best interests of their state or county, they might still challenge the line, Gellings said. This is part of why it can take as long as 12 years to get a single new transmission line built. In another example, de-regulation in many states has created a confused system where there are now lots of stakeholders in the electric grid, but nobody has an incentive to think about, or invest in, the long term.

If we want the grid to work as well three decades from now as it does today, we need to put some money into it. Massoud Amin has estimated the cost of grid improvements. To make the grid stronger—adding more high-voltage lines and upgrading the existing ones—he says we need to spend about $8 billion a year for 10 years. To make the grid smarter—digital, centralized, automated, and with the kind of big-picture communication that helps us stop blackouts before they happen—it’ll take an investment of $17-20 billion a year for 20 years.

That sounds like a lot of money. That sounds completely undoable. And maybe it is. But Amin says you have to think about what you’re saving, as well. Remember how much the 2003 blackout cost us? Most blackouts that happen aren’t that big. They’re local things, that happen to your neighborhood, or your town, or your county. But they happen a lot. Depending on what part of the United States you live in, the grid averages 90-214 minutes of blackout time per customer, per year*. And that’s not even counting the blackouts that happen because of extreme weather or other disasters, like fires. All that downtime adds up. Amin says the average cost is more than $100 billion per year.

And that’s the difference between an expense and an investment. Over time, the investment pays for itself.**

READ MORE
Learn about how the grid works and what grid controllers do by reading a free chapter from my book, Before the Lights Go Out.
Read the full report on the 2003 blackout

Kristen Iversen grew up in the shadow of two big secrets. The first was private. Her father was an alcoholic, and his problem grew bigger and harder to ignore or hide as Iversen got older. But the other secret didn't belong to just her and her family. Instead, it encompassed whole Colorado communities, two major corporations, and the US government.

Iversen grew up near Rocky Flats, a nuclear weapons plant near Denver. In much the same way as Iversen's family related to her father's alcoholism, Rocky Flats presented risks that nearly everyone involved preferred to ignore or cover up. In fact, years after several public exposes had made it very clear that Rocky Flats made nuclear bombs and that the corporate and government entities that ran the facility had cut corners and allowed massive amounts of plutonium to escape into the surrounding environment, people who lived in Iversen's neighborhood near the plant still refused to give up their long-held belief that it produced nothing more than Scrubbing Bubbles and dishwashing detergent.

Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats is memoir—albeit one that captures documented history as well as a family's private struggles. It's not really meant to be a book about science. But I think it's a powerful, well-written memoir that science buffs should read.

For better or for worse, the story of technology in the 20th century was the story of children growing up. At the beginning of the century, the zeitgeist of science was all about miracles. It was an age of wonders. There were never any side-effects. That changed mid-century, as we began to come to terms with the fact that our toys could be dangerous and that the people with the power to use them didn't always think (or care) about the potential harms.

As we think about and negotiate what our relationship with technology is going to be in the 21st century—and, for the record, I think that means synthesizing a mature perspective where we accept that everything has risks and worry about risk mitigation instead of the impossibility of complete risk avoidance—we are going to have to learn and learn from stories like this one.

On the one hand, that means understanding how governments, companies, and scientists have misused technology, and made unethical, dangerous decisions about it. Stories like the one Iversen tells are important, because they force us to look at how those decisions really affect people—even if you never find evidence of increased cancer rates or miscarriages or other kinds of expected physical damage, the psychological trauma has real impacts. And those impacts matter. (Think about what we know about Chernobyl, where, by some estimates, the psychological fallout has been worse and affected more people than the nuclear fallout.)

On the other hand, stories like the one Iversen tells are important because they also force us to think about our expectations and the fact that reality is sometimes a lot different. The outcomes we expect aren't necessarily the ones that happen. When Iversen is expecting to hear, any day now, that her father has drunk himself to death, someone does die. But it isn't him. Likewise, despite anecdotal evidence of rare and childhood cancers peppering this book, Iversen writes that nobody ever found a statistical increase in cancer or other health problems in the neighborhoods near Rocky Flats.

Along those same lines, when Iversen tells the story about how illegal and unethical behavior at Rocky Flats was exposed, it's not framed as a fight between "all the good people" and "the evil, faceless corporation". Instead, she captures the conflict within the community. Sometimes, even plant workers who are afraid of the risks posed by this kind of breach of public trust are more afraid of losing their jobs. Sometimes, they take criticism of what's happened at the plant as a personal attack against them. That, too, is important information to consider when we think about the future of technology and culture.

Shorter story: This is a great memoir that will get you thinking about the way society and technology interact. It's also a very fast read. I breezed through the 344 pages in a weekend—a speed that I usually associate more with my fiction-reading. Deep thoughts. Great storytelling.

Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats by Kristen Iversen

This photo, taken by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, shows a pair of shoes resting on the sea floor amidst the wreck of the Titanic. It's a powerful image, on its own. But with the background information, it becomes downright tear jerking.

Note the position of those shoes. Now think about the position of your feet if you were to lie on the floor, on your side, with your ankles crossed. This is not a coincidence. On his blog, NPR's Robert Krulwich quotes Titanic explorer Robert Ballard:

"There used to be bodies in those shoes. The body parts deteriorated, and the skeletal remains decalcified. The only thing left are the shoes, and the leather is perfectly preserved." The tannin in the shoe leather had apparently resisted the bacteria.

Read the rest of Robert Krulwich's post on shoes at sea, including information about the Titanic, as well as shoes spilled from lost shipping containers.

During that discussion, we touched a bit on the psychological impact all of this—the earthquake, the tsunami, the nuclear meltdowns—has had on the Japanese people. From studies of what's happened to the people who lived near Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, we know that the fear and stress associated with these kinds of disasters can have complex and long-ranging health effects.

Today, Paul Voosen, a journalist with Greenwire, emailed me a story he wrote last year, during the first month of the Fukushima crisis, that delves into some of the science behind how disasters (and especially nuclear disasters) affect the human psyche. If you've already read it, it's worth reading again.

Certainly, lasting scars of emotional distress -- which, at its worst, can manifest itself as serious depression or post-traumatic stress, among other symptoms -- are what researchers found in young mothers and others directly affected by past nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and seven years later at the much more serious Chernobyl meltdown in Ukraine.

"What's most striking," Bromet said, "both about Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, which are obviously completely different events with different environmental consequences, is that the emotional consequences just never end."

The Fukushima crisis is, of course, an incredibly difficult situation for Japan's authorities and residents. Caution is more than justifiable when it comes to radiation, and the fear and stress that could stem from radiation risk warnings would be difficult to prioritize over immediate health concerns, said Johan Havenaar, a Dutch psychiatrist who has worked with Chernobyl evacuees.

"It is an understandably frightening situation for [the Japanese]," he said, "even if the risk is small and the measure predominantly precautionary. ... It would be unfair to suggest that the psychological effects -- i.e. their fears -- are unjustified."

What authorities should do, and often fail to do, is treat mental and physical health problems with equal respect, understanding that the two go hand in hand, Bromet said. They must respect the persistent fears that will form about radiation exposure in Japan, no matter how low the exposure and how this can take a permanent toll on people's lives, she said.

You can read the rest of this article at The New York Times website.

If you want to know more about this, there are several other links I'd recommend:
• Charles Q. Choi wrote a great piece during his tour of Chernobyl last year about the health effects of that disaster, and why it's actually easier to spot the mental health impacts than the effects of radiation exposure.
• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a primer that explains how disasters affect the mental health of different groups of people, and how the impacts vary a lot based on how close you were to the tragedy.
• Chernobyl's Legacy is a document produced by a study group made up of the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the International Atomic Energy Agency and others. It summarizes a lot of the research showing both the mental health impact of that disaster, and how authorities have failed to respond to it.
• Another good paper, if you can find a full, free copy of it: Psychological and Perceived Health Effects of the Chernobyl Disaster: A 20-year Review.

Last night, PBS FRONTLINE aired a new documentary about what happened at the Fukushima nuclear power plant during the crucial first days of that crisis. Using amateur video shot during the earthquake and tsunami, interviews with power plant workers who were on the scene, and some astounding footage taken inside the power plant itself, the documentary is extremely powerful. It feels weird to say this, given the effect the meltdowns have had on Japan's energy situation and the lives of the people who lived and worked near the plant ... but it seems as though Fukushima could have been a lot worse. The documentary shows us the valiant risks taken by firemen and plant workers. It also shows us the moments where, in the midst of the Japanese government and utility company TEPCO doing a lot of things very wrong, individuals stepped up to make decisions that saved lives. Without those things, this would have been a very different (and much darker) story.

In about ten minutes, I'm going to be moderating a live Q&A with Dan Edge, the producer of Inside Japan's Nuclear Meltdown. I'll be asking him some questions about the story, and the process of filming a documentary like this. There will also be opportunities for you to ask Edge some questions, as well. (And I already know y'all are good at coming up with interview questions.)

You can follow along, or join in on the discussion, using the chat box embedded in this post. Hope to see you there!

Right now, I'm reading a book about why catastrophic technological failures happen and what, if anything, we can actually do about them. It's called Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow, a Yale sociologist.

I've not finished this book yet, but I've gotten far enough into it that I think I get Perrow's basic thesis. (People with more Perrow-reading experience, feel free to correct me, here.) Essentially, it's this: When there is inherent risk in using a technology, we try to build systems that take into account obvious, single-point failures and prevent them. The more single-point failures we try to prevent through system design, however, the more complex the systems become. Eventually, you have a system where the interactions between different fail-safes can, ironically, cause bigger failures that are harder to predict, and harder to spot as they're happening. Because of this, we have to make our decisions about technology from the position that we can never, truly, make technology risk-free.

I couldn't help think of Charles Perrow this morning, while reading Popular Mechanics' gripping account of what really happened on Air France 447, the jetliner that plunged into the Atlantic Ocean in the summer of 2009.

As writer Jeff Wise works his way through the transcript of the doomed plane's cockpit voice recorder, what we see, on the surface, looks like human error. Dumb pilots. But there's more going on than that. That's one of the other things I'm picking up from Perrow. What we call human error is often a mixture of simple mistakes, and the confusion inherent in working with complex systems.

Let me excerpt a couple of key parts of the Popular Mechanics piece. You really need to read the full thing, though. Be prepared to feel tense. This story will get your heart rate up, even though (and possibly because) you know the conclusion.

We now understand that, indeed, AF447 passed into clouds associated with a large system of thunderstorms, its speed sensors became iced over, and the autopilot disengaged. In the ensuing confusion, the pilots lost control of the airplane because they reacted incorrectly to the loss of instrumentation and then seemed unable to comprehend the nature of the problems they had caused. Neither weather nor malfunction doomed AF447, nor a complex chain of error, but a simple but persistent mistake on the part of one of the pilots.

Human judgments, of course, are never made in a vacuum. Pilots are part of a complex system that can either increase or reduce the probability that they will make a mistake. After this accident, the million-dollar question is whether training, instrumentation, and cockpit procedures can be modified all around the world so that no one will ever make this mistake again—or whether the inclusion of the human element will always entail the possibility of a catastrophic outcome. After all, the men who crashed AF447 were three highly trained pilots flying for one of the most prestigious fleets in the world. If they could fly a perfectly good plane into the ocean, then what airline could plausibly say, "Our pilots would never do that"?

One of the pilots seems to have kept the nose of the plane up throughout the growing disaster, making this choice over and over, even though it was the worst possible thing he could have done. At the same time, everyone in the cockpit seems to have completely ignored an alarm system that was, explicitly, telling them that the plane was stalling.

Why would they do that? As Wise points out, this is the kind of mistake highly trained pilots shouldn't make. But they did it. And they seem to have done it because of what they knew, and thought they knew, about the plane's complex safety systems. Take that stall alarm, for instance. Turns out, there's a surprisingly logical reason why someone might ignore that alarm.

Still, the pilots continue to ignore it, and the reason may be that they believe it is impossible for them to stall the airplane. It's not an entirely unreasonable idea: The Airbus is a fly-by-wire plane; the control inputs are not fed directly to the control surfaces, but to a computer, which then in turn commands actuators that move the ailerons, rudder, elevator, and flaps. The vast majority of the time, the computer operates within what's known as normal law, which means that the computer will not enact any control movements that would cause the plane to leave its flight envelope. "You can't stall the airplane in normal law," says Godfrey Camilleri, a flight instructor who teaches Airbus 330 systems to US Airways pilots.

But once the computer lost its airspeed data, it disconnected the autopilot and switched from normal law to "alternate law," a regime with far fewer restrictions on what a pilot can do. "Once you're in alternate law, you can stall the airplane," Camilleri says. It's quite possible that Bonin had never flown an airplane in alternate law, or understood its lack of restrictions. According to Camilleri, not one of US Airway's 17 Airbus 330s has ever been in alternate law. Therefore, Bonin may have assumed that the stall warning was spurious because he didn't realize that the plane could remove its own restrictions against stalling and, indeed, had done so.

That, I think, is where Charles Perrow and Air France 447 cross paths. It follows closely with a concept that Perrow calls "incomprehensibility." Basically, the people involved in an accident like this often can't figure out fast enough what is happening. That's because, in high-stress situations, the brain reverts to well-trod models that help you understand your world. You think about the stuff you've practiced 1000 times. You think about what you've been told will happen, if x happens.

But what happens if what's actually going on doesn't mesh with your training? Then the brain finds ways to make it mesh. Those rational explanations might make a whole lot of sense to you, in the moment. But they will lead you to make mistakes that exacerbate an already growing problem.

This is not comforting stuff.

Perrow doesn't tell us that we can figure out how to design a system that never becomes incomprehensible. There is no happy ending. We can design better systems, systems that take the way the brain works into account. We can make systems safer, to a point. But we cannot make a safe system. There is no such thing as a plane that will never crash. There is no such thing as a pilot who will always know the right thing to do.

Instead, Perrow's book is more about how we make decisions regarding risky technologies. Which high-risk technologies are we comfortable using and in what contexts? How do we decide whether the benefit outweighs the risk?

We must have these conversations. We cannot have these conversations if we're clinging to the position that anything less than 100% safety is unacceptable. We cannot have these conversations if we're clinging to the position that good governance and good engineering can create a risk-free world, where accidents only happen to idiots.

I used to believe both those myths. I want to believe them still. Increasingly, I can't. Looking at technological safety in terms of absolutes is child's view of the world. What Perrow is really saying is that it's time for us to grow up.

Meanwhile, it's still flooding in Thailand. And, after three months of this, the Thai people have been forced to get creative.

Thai Flood Hacks is a Tumblr that feels like a pean to human ingenuity. Here, you will find boats made out of old water bottles. Homemade jet skis. Raised walkways built from shopping carts. Guys just out walking around on stilts. It's amazing. Thai Happy Mutants have pulled off some awe-inspiring instant solutions that allow them to get on with their lives in the middle of an infrastructure-crippling natural disaster.

Via Neatorama