South Australia has no power

[Someone]

PS A modern built in gas stove isn't a lot of use in power failure as a lot need mains for safety circuits / gas solenoids. Camping gear is useful.

In the UK the vast majority of houses are gas powered for heat and cooking (natural gas not gasoline), and electricity for the rest. The cost of electricity is nearly an order of magnitude higher than gas per kWh.

We have similarly expensive electricity in Australia, with gas around 3-4x cheaper per unit of energy (similar ratio to our solar feed in tarrifs which is why solar electric hot water makes sense).

Our modern gas cooktop will run fine without electricity, the safety cutouts are all thermal so you just need a source of ignition.

[BradC]

You can find ethanol free gas but even that has a limited life. Preservatives only add another year or two. Diesel fuel is no better.

I think the building engineers in almost every large facility worldwide from highrise to hospitals would vehemently disagree with your assessment on the storage life of Diesel.
Provided it is appropriately treated for organic material (bacteria) and kept dry, compared to the more volatile petroleum products Diesel has orders of magnitude more storage life. That is one of the main reasons diesel backups make up the majority of the standby power anywhere in the world. Gas turbines are becoming more popular in well connected cities, but you can't beat the longevity and power density of a big diesel tank when you need power.

[mtdoc]

You can find ethanol free gas but even that has a limited life. Preservatives only add another year or two. Diesel fuel is no better.

I think the building engineers in almost every large facility worldwide from highrise to hospitals would vehemently disagree with your assessment on the storage life of Diesel.
Provided it is appropriately treated for organic material (bacteria) and kept dry, compared to the more volatile petroleum products Diesel has orders of magnitude more storage life. That is one of the main reasons diesel backups make up the majority of the standby power anywhere
in the world. Gas turbines are becoming more popular in well connected cities, but you can't beat the longevity and power density of a big diesel tank when you need power.

Diesel treated with approriate fungicides and bacteriocides can at best be stored for a few years (anywhere from 2-5 depending on storage temperature and opinion - NFPA 110 says 1.5 - 2 years) - similar to properly treated and stored gasoline. (lots of info on the web to verify that fact). There may be other ways to extend it's life some but at most it will get you marginally better storage life,  certainly not "orders of magnitude better".

Diesel for institutional standby generators must be and is - properly rotated to ensure fresh fuel is available.   The reasons why diesel power is chosen over gasoline for prime mover standby generators is not because of any meaningfull differences in storage life of the fuel.

In any case, my point was that propane is much, much better than gasoline or diesel in regards to storage life. Assuming you have no leaks in your tank, it can be stored for decades.

[Tinkerer]

you need additional pylons





-starcraft-

Haha, ah good ole Starcraft. But its actually "You must construct additional pylons."


These days the power doesnt go out for me. A few years back our power would go out with every big storm. Then the power company said they had made upgrades to ensure that wouldnt happen anymore. We didnt think they were actually serious at first. But what do ya know, our power never goes out now, even when we get hit with a hurricane.

[Cyberdragon]

Alot of the suburbs in my town (including mine), are still on a single phase system. We don't have too much of a problem except occational flickering.

[jonovid]

here is a re-post  22 South Australian power transmission towers were brought down in the strong winds. here in SA We had some Adelaide politicians running around like a headless chickens  knowing that IF power had been still out by the weekend & all the beer gets warm, crime rates may go up, then politicians get voted out of office.    politicians

[dannyf]

22 South Australian power transmission towers were brought down in the strong winds.

It must have happened in China: chinese-engineered pylons built with chinese-made steel, on chinese-made concrete, and put together by a chinese crew using chinese tools powered by chinese electricity and mounted on chinese soil.

Australia is the land of quality and no way australian pylons could have fell so easily like spaghetti.

[tautech]

Unless those pylons were very old (50+ yrs) the smart money would be on them being made with quality  Aussie BHP steel.
Close up pics anybody?

[Muttley Snickers]

Yep, our steel is as tough as nails down here.   

My theory in regards to why the power line stanchions toppled over was along the lines of the supported cables perhaps reaching a vulnerable oscillation in addition to lateral wind loading on the towers themselves, the authorities commenting on the event did declare that the winds at the time were of a cyclonic nature, this and the domino effect may explain why so many towers went over laterally going by the posted pictures.

Anyway, that's my theory and I'm selling it cheap.    

[Marco]

Those ground anchors look like they needed more rebar.

[coppice]

Those ground anchors look like they needed more rebar.

Why? They haven't broken up. They appear to have just been ripped from the ground intact. Either they were not made deep enough to provide an adequate anchor, or perhaps the material around them had eroded over time, leaving too little embedded in the ground.

[zapta]

Clueless utility. I would use uBeam technology to quickly bridge the broken sections.

[med6753]

Any update to this? That is one hell of a mess.

And welcome to my (3rd) world. The vast majority of power distribution here is overhead lines. And deciduous woodland (Read: tall trees). Combine that with the power companies lousy effort to keep the trees trimmed back from the lines. So every few years we get hammered with a 3-4 day outage due to a major event such as a wind storm or ice storm. The last major outage was Hurricane Sandy so we're overdue. But we also have at least 2 to 3 short outages every year due to such things as a vehicle clobbering a pole, or a Summer thunderstorm, or a wayward squirrel committing suicide and causing a line trip.     

[rdl]

Those ground anchors look like they needed more rebar.

Why? They haven't broken up. They appear to have just been ripped from the ground intact. Either they were not made deep enough to provide an adequate anchor, or perhaps the material around them had eroded over time, leaving too little embedded in the ground.

Actually, in most of these photos they are bent over some distance up with the bottom and pad still firmly attached to the ground.

[RGB255_0_0]

Can understand ones being ripped up in desert but lush, green land should've been a tad stronger.

[coppice]

Those ground anchors look like they needed more rebar.

Why? They haven't broken up. They appear to have just been ripped from the ground intact. Either they were not made deep enough to provide an adequate anchor, or perhaps the material around them had eroded over time, leaving too little embedded in the ground.

Actually, in most of these photos they are bent over some distance up with the bottom and pad still firmly attached to the ground.

True, but rebar clearly doesn't enter the picture for those. The wind resistance of such an open mesh structure can't be that high. Lines usually come down when a large area of ice builds up, and wind resistance or shear weight increases to breaking point. I would expect warm towers to be damned hard to blow down.

[CatalinaWOW]

Clearly there are multiple failure modes shown in the picture.  There are a lot of possibilities.  Were the winds greater than those used to design the towers?  Was there hail, extremely heavy rain or flocks of avians which would couple the wind energy more effectively to the towers?  Were the winds over the last decade or more higher and more variable than predicted contributing to a fatigue failure in the towers?  Was maintenance shorted or neglected to save money, resulting in corrosion failure or failure to detect fatigue failures?  Sabatauge?

Once one tower goes the loads on adjacent towers increase so multiple failures seem likely rather than unusual.  Maybe the one picture showing the foundation failure is the trigger for all of the rest.

The real message here?  The preppers aren't completely crazy.  A little bit of effort to think about general things that could go wrong and what can be done to be ready for them may not save your life, but it can dramatically increase your comfort when something like this happens.  I am not what most would call a prepper, but I have lots of food and camping gear and would expect to ride something like this or the hurricane Sandy event out with a minimum of discomfort.  The idea isn't to survive the collapse of civilization, but to ride out a temporary interruption of civilization without pain.  Those temporary interruptions are inevitable on the global scale, whether from natural disasters like floods, fires, earthquakes and the like or man made problems like terrorism, riots and strikes.  While not every region will suffer from one or more of these types of events, they are not negligible events for most populated areas of the world.

[NiHaoMike]

What we need are pedal powered generators. No need to store fuel for them and they serve a dual purpose during cold weather. Make them portable and they'll be useful to power portable electronics during more usual times.

Those who really need Internet service to stay up can't beat satellite, ideally in combination with a more traditional service. Maybe a self contained satellite router with a service geared for emergency use would make a lot of sense? There should be no or very small monthly fee to have the service (the equipment would have to paid for up front) but a substantial fee to actually use it.

There's also a lot of stories about EVs being no worse off when the grid is down since gas stations rely on the grid. (Any reason why they haven't thought about patching in a generator or inverter? They could profit a lot doing that!) Or get a plug in hybrid and have the best of both worlds.

[dannyf]

being made with quality  Aussie BHP steel.

would hate to see high quality aussie steel being implicated here for early withdrawing from service.

even the shitty american steel wouldn't do that, at least not that easily.

[johansen]

solar grid tie inverters have no ability to generate reactive power, so if you can get them to backfeed a centeral sine wave inverter and charge your say, 24 or 48 volt battery pack, when you pull a load on the system the central ups has to supply all the reactive power.

so, for most homes where the largest reactive power demand is a 1/4th hp induction motor, this is not a problem. but a 2KW ups combined with 5KW of solar, is not likely to run your heat pump. however if you build a legit 20KW capable sine wave inverter, (even if your batteries can't handle 20kw of power) then you'll have a stiff enough micro grid so to speak to run about a dozen kw of solar grid tie inverters into your system. provided of course you have a big enough dump load on the battery side.



secondly, on gasoline storage.. i have heard that there may be an attempt to dissolve butane into the summer blend of gasoline (of which there is a glut) in order to pass it off as winter blend this year in parts of the USA. so, as to why gas goes bad.. and a plastic can of it expands like a balloon in sunlight, even though the boiling point of octane is 125 Celsius.. well, its not the gas going bad folks.. its the other stuff evaporating out.

I have a rototiller that started fine with half a liter of gas left in its black plastic 1 gallon fuel tank for over a year in direct sunlight (though here in the pacific northwest we don't get much). the thermal cycling had pulled in enough moisture to separate out the ethanol, but after draining the water ethanol mix off the bottom of the tank, it started fine. probably ran better without the ethanol too..


I have some #2 fuel oil that is over 20 years old. seems to be fine....

[SeanB]

Well, here in South Africa pretty much every garage has a generator ( thank you Eishkom) along with a lot of homes. Problem with a garage is the tankage is mostly enough to run for around 3 days before they need a refill from a tanker truck, so after 3 days most if not all garages will be out of either all fuel or the most popular in that area.

As for the pylons failing in a line, it is most likely a wind loading, with the wind being strong enough that the force caused one bolt to fail, probably from being loose for a while ( vibration in those towers does mean they tend to have issues with fasteners coming loose, especially if they are not regularly inspected to to bottom by a crew that does a check on each single connection, which I would bet has not been done here properly for a decade or more) and which fell out, leading to the redundant bolt taking the full load. Then this weak bolt ( on the lee side, so with a compressive load in addition to the static load from the pylon and the cables) failed in the storm, and the tower started to sway, and this oscillation built up till the support members buckled and it went down. This then added a massive step loading to the pylons both sides, and the insulators did not fail there, but dragged the structure with a massive side load, causing a similar buckling that propagated down till there was either a bend in the line to provide relief, or the line went over a hill doing the same, or the cables snapped or the insulators failed and dropped the lines. In any case there would have been a ground faule as the first pylon collapsed, which would have tripped the line, and then 2 further reclose events before the supply side feed flagged the line as a hard failure and locked it out.

[tautech]

Can understand ones being ripped up in desert but lush, green land should've been a tad stronger.

Just 'cause it looks green don't think it's not desert. This area of OZ has had a shite load of rain (for them) and as it's their spring too, things will look green.



Most of OZ is one giant iron ore resource and drilling into such back when these pylons were installed would've been a major undertaking, let alone the logistics of supplying concrete to remote sites in any quantity so one might imagine that groundwork was kept to the minimum requirement.
Couple this with the unusually wet winter/spring and the resultant dampness around the concrete footing that could act as a lubricant, it's not hard to imagine these being yanked from the ground in an extreme weather event.

I've seen similar toppling of trees, sometimes in extremely gusty weather when the trees are rocked back and forth loosening the roots until they can't stand it anymore and they yield to the gusts with the roots just slipping from the earth in much the same way as this pylon looks to have done.
As it was a big rain event too, any surplus water would've found it's way into the footing hole as the pylon was being rocked back and forth with wind gusts.

Loose, wet and shallow footings, big gusts.....over she goes. 

[RGB255_0_0]

Looking at that picture, though, they look like they snapped right off.

[dannyf]

in terms of bad weather and shitty american steel, check this out:

the highest wind speed recorded there was like 231 mph - just insane.

they have quite a few (american) steel structures there, including a house that's chained down by a few (american) steel chains.

not sure if aussie steel would have performed better there.

Also, check up the drive up the mountain,

[zapta]

even the shitty american steel wouldn't do that, at least not that easily.

We have here a problem with Bay Bridge steel cracking at the bottom of the bay. It will be put to test in the next big earthquake. IIRC it's Chinese steel.