On 27/06/2012 21:39, Dave Liquorice wrote:
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.

Usually quicker to phone them. Tends to happen when it is very windy or
ice build up occurs round here. Sometimes things just blow up. Or a tree
falls through the line. I have a good picture somewhere of a tree being
held off the ground by the village power line! It bent all the poles and
they are marked as "unsafe" to climb manually now.

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.

Phone lines stay good but you need a hardwired handset since wireless
handset basestation phones don't play with no power. Neither does VOIP.

If the line reset very quickly for sure no one went to find a fault,
so they will know which line tripped but the cause may remain a
mystery, lightning strike, bird strike, who knows ?

Sometimes turned off to make a new connection or repair a known fault
according to the bods that visit the substation in my garden.

If it was off for only a second or two that would have been an autorecloser
tripping and resetting due to a bird strike or wet branch getting blown up.

Or in some cases with old power cables the perished "insulation"
flapping about in the breeze and striking another phase when wet.

Long enough to find a torch or think "is it going to come back" is more
likely to be switching to route supplies around a fault or possibly switching
feeds to the local 33kV substation. When they switch between the 33kV main
feed and 11kV backup to the local substation here it takes a couple of
minutes.

I have a couple of LED torches with the switch bridged by a 10M resistor
so that they glow continuously. That way after dark adaption you can
find them in total darkness. Where I live is seriously dark if the mains
fails. I have two emergency lights - kitchen and dining room.

When the power goes off here I sort out torches and shutdown computers on the
UPS then call the DNO. It's about 50:50 if they have had a call or been
automatically alerted already but they can normally look it up on the system
and say "oh, yes we do have a high voltage fault".

(*) Major being something that affects more than 50 to 100 customers or has
been on going for a long time.

I usually do ring the power co and then check on my elderly neighbour.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown