On 2009-08-31, Cydrome Leader wrote:
damn shame. terrible tragedy.

the wiki article said the one turbine blowing up caused a electric shutdown
which resulted in the other turbines that were on line to overspeed and blow
up too.
amazing.

clever design.

An interesting story, all in all. Allows for good after the fact
thinking.

How would one stop a hydroturbine, if its electric load disappeared?
I would suppose that it would overspeed in seconds, so anything to
stop a turbine, would need to be done quickly and automatically.

Open some sort of a sluice in the line that feeds turbine with water,
to divert and dump the water elsewhere, would seem like the only
possible solution.

The amount of available options would depend on how quickly the water
would overspeed the turbine. Such a calculation should be possible
based on available data, such as water column height, turbine mass,
and turbine radius.

i