Case study
When short circuits are not interrupted promptly, electrical fires and explosions can occur. To minimize the probability of electrical fire and explosion, the following are recommended: Careful design of electric power system layouts Quality equipment installation Power system protection that provides rapid detection and isolation of faults (see Chapter 10) Automatic fire-suppression systems Formal maintenance programs and inspection intervals Repair or retirement of damaged or decrepit equipment The following article describes incidents at three U.S. utilities during the summer of 1990 [8].
Fires at U.S. Utilities GLENN ZORPETTE Electrical fires in substations were the cause of three major midsummer power outages in the United States, two on Chicago's West Side and one in New York City's downtown financial district. In Chicago, the trouble began Saturday night, July 28, with a fire in switch house No. 1 at the Commonwealth Edison Co.'s Crawfor Some 40,000 residents of Chicago's West Side lost electricity. About 25,000 had service restored within a day or so and the rest, within three days. However, as part of the restoration, Commonwealth Edison installed a temporary line configuration around the Crawford substation. But when a second fire broke out on Aug. 5 in a different, nearby substation, some of the protective systems that would have isolated that fire were inoperable because of that configuration. Thus, what would have been a minor mishap resulted in a one-day loss of power to 25,000 customers-the same 25,000 whose electricity was restored first after the Crawford fire. The New York outage began around midday on Aug. 13, after an electrical fire broke out in switching equipment at Consolidated Edison's Seaport substation, a point of entry into Manhattan for five 138-kilovolt transmission lines. To interrupt the flow of energy to the fire, Edison had to disconnect the five lines, which cut power to four networks in downtown Manhattan, according to Con Ed spokeswoman Martha Liipfert. Power was restored to three of the networks within about five hours, but the fourth network, Fulton-which carried electricity to about 2400 separate residences and 815 businesses-was out until Aug. 21. Liipfert said much of the equipment in the Seaport substation will have to be replaced, at an estimated cost of about $25 million. Mounting concern about underground electrical vaults in some areas was tragically validated by an explosion in Pasadena, Calif., that killed three city workers in a vault. Partly in response to the explosion, the California Public Utilities Commission adopted new regulations last Nov. 21 requiring that utilities in the state set up formal maintenance programs, inspection intervals, and guidelines for rejecting decrepit or inferior equipment. ‘‘They have to maintain a paper trail, and we as a commission will do inspections of underground vaults and review their records to make sure they're maintaining their vaults and equipment in good order,'' said Russ Copeland, head of the commission's utility safety branch.
CASE STUDY QUESTIONS
A. Are safety hazards associated with generation, transmission, and distribution of electric power by the electric utility industry greater than or less than safety hazards associated with the transportation industry? The chemical products industry? The medical services industry? The agriculture industry?
B. What is the public's perception of the electric utility industry's safety record?