In message , fred writes
In article o.uk,
Dave Liquorice writes
On Wed, 27 Jun 2012 19:41:27 +0100, ARWadsworth wrote:

Is there any online resource which carries immediate reports of
power outages and causes?

Try your local DNO's web site. Ours, ENW, has a page with major(*) outages on
it but I think it's a manual update rather than a link from the automatic
monitoring.

Given that a substantial minority of the public now have a smart
phone which can access web sites, then t'Internet is a valid route
for a query. Unless of course the cellular masts and the local
telephone exchange are down, in which case a phone number isn't much
use either.

The mobile networks fail as the power goes or very quickly afterwards, very
few cells have anything more than "safe shutdown" backup power arrangements.
BT telephone exchanges are all equipped with large lead acid batteries and
even the garden sheds out in rural areas also have gensets.

A favourite recollection of a failure of such a backup was a repeated
one at a major BT installation where starting the backup generator
produced a puff of smoke which was drawn in through an air intake to a
smoke detector, causing the fire alarm to trigger and forcing the
generator to be shut down.

I've got one of those.... around 1965 we were commissioning the control
gear for the Clywedog dam in central Wales. 500kVA Pelton Wheel with a
100kVA diesel gen. set as back up and house supply.

Came the day the big shots arrived to be impressed and all us external
engineers were ushered out of sight:-)

We saw the lights flicker as the newly trained site engineer
synchronised the Pelton Wheel. The next move was to open up the supply
valve to take over the load. This he clearly forgot as everything went
dark followed by the diesel set starting up....

regards

--
Tim Lamb