[HN Gopher] Dancing starling spectacle caused power cuts in Scot...
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Dancing starling spectacle caused power cuts in Scottish village
(2020)
Author : lobbly
Score : 41 points
Date : 2022-06-09 06:56 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Why is there a powercut? Because there was a tweet-storm.
| henearkr wrote:
| Well, there seems to be no trees there, so the starlings are
| sitting on the power lines because no choice.
| smcl wrote:
| There aren't any trees in that particular field, but Airth
| isn't exactly in a barren treeless wasteland - there are
| pockets of woodland around the village:
| https://www.google.com/maps/place/Airth,+Falkirk,+UK/@56.067...
| henearkr wrote:
| Right, fair enough, but if there were trees regularly
| everywhere, there would be no huge tree-less (but powerline-
| ful) area, and between a weird chair-powerline and a nice
| chair-tree, I guess the choice is easy for a bird.
|
| I mean, if there were _neither_ any power lines, the
| starlings would certainly sit a bit further, but there _are_
| powerlines (i.e. chairs), so here they are.
|
| (did you notice, I'm trying to think bird)
| [deleted]
| smcl wrote:
| I did! Good job. But for me the weird thing is that it's a
| pretty typical landscape outside the cities in the Scottish
| central belt so it's weird this has just happened here
| lbriner wrote:
| What makes me slightly angry is the supplier saying they don't
| know what is causing it when all they had to do was go there and
| look!
|
| That is my biggest gripe with corporates and bureaucracies, they
| talk a lot when a simple bit of action would nip something in the
| bud! We have become feaful people who would rather write an email
| than call somebody or go and see them in-person.
| Someone wrote:
| Go where? Chances are there's quite a few km of power lines in
| sometimes badly reachable places to inspect.
|
| Also, given that the interruptions were intermittent, it
| wouldn't just be a matter of checking the power lines once.
|
| I also don't rule out they have fairly good stats on causes of
| intermittent short power interruptions, and looked at more
| likely causes first.
|
| I don't think there is enough info in this article to put blame
| this way.
| TheFattestNinja wrote:
| It's true it might be inaccessible and that they have
| telemetry. But if the issue is recurring and you find no
| solution in the data you gotta walk the line. In fact this
| time it was the solution but ill grant you its an unlikely
| event. So you are both right? In medicine you always ALWAYS
| perform visual inspection of the site no matter how sure you
| are.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| If a short happens on the line in theory if they can
| measure the amount current they can figure out the
| resistance and how far down the line to go.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Most distribution setups are in series. If a line faults,
| it's gonna travel upstream, kill the fuse, and then drop
| power for everyone downstream. There's nothing on those
| lines measuring power aside from the meters at the end
| customers.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Utilities do expect their equipment in the field every
| several years, including physical measurements of things
| like poles. As well as checking power lines for foliage
| interfering with the conductors. They will also go out and
| check things in response to complaints. But this is a hard
| one. If you go out and there's no birds, you haven't
| learned anything. You're probably going to suspect it's
| something weird with the transformers or something.
| Someone wrote:
| This article says _"There 's been several unexplained
| outages around dusk in recent weeks"_.
|
| If that's Althea had, I think a few weeks is a decent time
| frame for debugging this. Chances are there were days in
| which nothing happened, and it can't have been evident soon
| that the "around dusk" part was significant.
| arethuza wrote:
| I live in rural Scotland and we had a mild problem with our
| electricity supply - our lights were flickering slightly,
| nobody else noticed but it was really annoying me.
|
| I contacted the electricity supplier and they had a team
| come out within 24 hours - which rather surprised me. Turns
| out there was arcing at a junction box in the supply
| outside of our property which they fixed pretty quickly -
| presumably they react to things like that promptly due to
| potential fire risks.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Most utilities are very responsive to customer complaints
| in my experience. It's often the only signal they have of
| something being wrong short of a fuse breaking and
| completely dropping the power. If you don't have smart
| meters giving real time data there's no way to know about
| this.
| arethuza wrote:
| We've had two attempts to have a smart meter installed -
| each time they come round, check the mobile phone signal
| strength and go away again....
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I absolutely adore starlings. I used to work across from a wild
| meadow. In the fall starlings would gorge on some kind of berries
| from the meadow and then sit on the power lines on my side of the
| street. The result: a several hundred meter long line of pink
| bird poop on the sidewalk.
|
| What always amazed me is how their takeoffs and landings seem
| synchronized. One second they're sitting on the power line
| chattering at each other - creating a great racket - and then
| suddenly everything goes quiet and they all take off together.
| lukeplato wrote:
| Worth pointing out the irony in terms of self-organized
| criticality [0], which describes the activity of starlings
| flocking together in terms of dynamical systems and is also used
| in self-organized criticality control [1] which has been applied
| to power grids to prevent power outages (from cascades of load
| shedding).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality_con...
| Angostura wrote:
| > He said the firm would work with RSPB Scotland to find ways to
| discourage the birds from the power lines.
|
| Or just maybe install some plastic spacing rods in the effected
| stretch to prevent the wires clashing.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > Install some plastic spacing rods in the effected stretch...
|
| No! Nature is the enemy! We can't let birds around the cables.
| They're fake anyway! /s.
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