National Grid Outage: Are you ready?

[psydii]

Apropos of nothing ::cough::

 

Is your school ready for a multi-day regional/national power outage - one where where internet and cloud also end up offline?

[PotNoodleTech]

Well I am ready at home been building this up for the last two years - all essential loads battery backed up should be able to last a week, longer if it's sunny.  There's always plugging in a small honda type genny if needed.

 

 

School wise, not a chance in hell.  Given what we regularly pull on 3 x 200amp phases we'd need a football field or two's worth of solar pannels and enough batteries to make elon musk rich, or just a gynormous CAT generator the size of an artic lorry.  All three of those are things schools can not afford.

 

So - schools will all be down, your BT exchange will go down after a day without power, and your petrol pumps will cease to work and generally society will descend into an ape like structure.

 

Whether you can get into SIMS or reset a password in google will be the least of your worries IMHO.

 

 

Edited April 28, 2025 by PotNoodleTech
typo

[localzuk]

22 minutes ago, psydii said:

Apropos of nothing ::cough::

 

Is your school ready for a multi-day regional/national power outage - one where where internet and cloud also end up offline?

I don't think many schools would be ready for this, even if they had everything onsite. No power means a bunch of other things don't work as well, so I suspect we'd see schools closed regardless.

[chris11256]

Was just talking to our site manager about this, he said even with full staffing we'd have to close because there'd be no lighting and the batteries for emergency lighting would have run out after a few hours.

Edited April 28, 2025 by chris11256

[psydii]

I was thinking more  along the lines of "is this scenario covered in the Business Continuity plan".  One may find oneself with a school full of kids and no way (or limited ways) for them to use public transport or contact home.  I'm assuming that the mobile networks would stay up for a little longer that the lights/servers do, so do you have a plan in place to get the kids home when the servers/internet is down? Is there a comms plan to get people to check in if the outage is extended (days/weeks etc)?

 

I'm ignoring the fact that all their nuclear power stations are currently running on diesel generators, but if that goes wrong and the wind changes, we're likely all in a work from home until further notice scenario - but we've all done that before!

 

[Olliedawg]

Nope lol

[3s-gtech]

We have managed to remain open after an outage, for a few hours. The battery backups for the fire alarm and school bell held out. Longer than that, no. Servers/net down, so paper registers, but we'd start to lose things like door controls, extraction systems, hot water, and most importantly, access to coffee. We'd need that.

[psydii]

4 minutes ago, 3s-gtech said:

access to coffee. 

Make friends with the science technician(s). Nothing so good as instant coffee made in lab glassware over a bunsen burner.

 

(FWIW my first IT outage was the '87 storm and we were off for weeks, and running 180V for months. I I lived of that stuff. Mind you I was *way* to young to really have been allowed to prove the supply voltage was that low, and recovering the IT suites out of the smashed up buildings was a positively Dickensian use of small agile children!)

[machy]

23 minutes ago, 3s-gtech said:

We have managed to remain open after an outage, for a few hours. The battery backups for the fire alarm and school bell held out. Longer than that, no. Servers/net down, so paper registers, but we'd start to lose things like door controls, extraction systems, hot water, and most importantly, access to coffee. We'd need that.

i keep a jet boil in my car for this reason 

[robintech]

 

Cash has been actually very useful the last couple of times payment processors went down, water as well with outages in the area.

 

44 minutes ago, PotNoodleTech said:

So - schools will all be down, your BT exchange will go down after a day without power, and your petrol pumps will cease to work and generally society will descend into an ape like structure.

 

Yes seems a bit pointless unless its a very localised small area, how are people going to cope at home with a multi day regional outage? 

[ITGuyNW]

Not in the slightest

[paulkerton]

Just reminds me of the classic kxcd 

https://xkcd.com/2347/

But this time, it's not the digital stack.

[localzuk]

On a personal level, I got a few things in to deal with some sort of outage like this, back when Russia invaded Ukraine. Camping stove, spare cans of gas, matches, tealights, etc... Enough to last me a week of making basic food from cans, etc...

 

Only thing I don't currently have is a stock of water.

[Andrew_C]

1 hour ago, PotNoodleTech said:

 

your BT exchange will go down after a day without power,

 

Won't last a day. It would have done in the days of twisted copper and humongous batteries, but with VOIP?  Phones dead in an instant.

 

For real excitement, consider a boarding school...

Edited April 28, 2025 by Andrew_C

[Rob_D]

34 minutes ago, psydii said:

I was thinking more  along the lines of "is this scenario covered in the Business Continuity plan".

If it's local power outage our DR says to send everyone home and pivot to remote learning. But for something national (or even county-wide), I think you'd have to defer to central government, who I guess be communicating over the emergency broadcast system (for the 3 people with wind-up radios).

 

3 minutes ago, Andrew_C said:

Won't last a day. It would have done in the days of twisted copper and humongous batteries, but with VOIP?  Phones dead in an instant.

Surely it would last a couple of hours? Maybe half a day?

 

 

[PotNoodleTech]

I was being polite lol - they should have some kind of battery backup but as Andrew said it's probalby not gonna last long.

[Andrew_C]

The exchange might, but every link in the chain?  ALL the little green boxes?  Parents' modems?

[sigma]

1 hour ago, psydii said:

Make friends with the science technician(s). Nothing so good as instant coffee made in lab glassware over a bunsen burner.

 

(FWIW my first IT outage was the '87 storm and we were off for weeks, and running 180V for months. I I lived of that stuff. Mind you I was *way* to young to really have been allowed to prove the supply voltage was that low, and recovering the IT suites out of the smashed up buildings was a positively Dickensian use of small agile children!)

In the 87 storm, we had generators at the data centre, which we tested periodically, but those of us who lived out in the villages were mostly unable to travel in for a few days because of all the trees and cables that were down.  The last time we had a power cut of any significance at home, UK Power Networks brought a generator which we had for a week. 

[sigma]

17 minutes ago, Andrew_C said:

The exchange might, but every link in the chain?  ALL the little green boxes?  Parents' modems?

When the exchanges were upgraded, nobody wanted to pay for generators, so they only have batteries now. 

[andy_b]

My "home" EE Cell tower has no battery backup, lose connection every power cut.

 

O2 seems fine though....

[psydii]

Yeah my home fibre router has a battery backup option. They are tiny, when I asked why so small, the response was - there's no point you paying to keep your home router up for longer that the ISP/Teleco can keep  their end going.

 

On Boarding Schools - don't they have generators? I remember being without power for a couple of days back way back when, certain things were kept running, the switchboard and kitchens being the priority. Early bed-time, wear double layers, cold showers (man-up!), staff patrolling the grounds with torches.  

 

The real fun was when the power would go out for a few minutes/hours in the winter during the evening meal - imagine  100+ teenagers with food on their trays plunged into total darkness. Carnage. (sensible people knew dive under the tables and wait 15 seconds - the generator would usually kick and those that didn't wait often got caught.)

[pete]

Work?  Not in the slightest.  Even if we could source a couple of containerized diesel generators, sourcing sufficient fuel (absent a pre-agreed fuel contract with heavy penalties for non-delivery) from ideally two different directions wouldn't really be feasible.  Plus we'd need one per school to keep the basics running and then another just to drive the kitchens (all electric) at the secondaries.

 

Home?  There's bottled water, candles, torches, battery banks and tinned food and noodles etc for a week or two if need be.

[ITGuyNW]

When we had an internet outage for 24 hours last year, it was amazing how many teachers simply cannot fallback to using pens/papers/planning lessons for a day. They've been brought up on digital registers, youtube, cloud platforms. It was a real eye opener.

 

Back in my day (dons flat cap, pipe, rocking chair) my teachers would plan entire lessons from memory on the blackboard and it would be one of those pull down roller ones, so they'd simply pull it down and have the lesson ready and waiting for when we arrived. I don't think many teachers now would be able to plan a lesson on the fly without technology.

 

We also had an extended period at one point of no power whatsoever through school. We had to get a diesel generator in to power the essentials and then people worked from home. 

 

 

[Oaktech]

At home, it would be merely an inconvenience for about 2 weeks, we normally cook on electric, but I have a camping gas stove with grill and several large blue bottles and  both a large battery backup set, and a petrol generator capable of keeping fridges and freezers working and several large cans of fuel. If the worst came to the worst I have a stream in my garden I could collect and filter water from. 

 

At work we have about 2 hours worth of battery backup to keep telephone systems up long enough to contact parents. After that we'd be out. We're fully cloud based.     

Edited April 29, 2025 by Oaktech

[msi_school]

15 hours ago, psydii said:

Yeah my home fibre router has a battery backup option. They are tiny, when I asked why so small, the response was - there's no point you paying to keep your home router up for longer that the ISP/Teleco can keep  their end going.

I live in a village with overhead power lines so I have about 6-7 powercuts a year as this was becoming annoying I set up a UPS system for my network kit, modem etc that lasts for about an hour.

 

When the next powercut happend I was smugly watching somthing on my tablet for about 15 minutes before the fiber connection went down at teh ISPs end.