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When I was 18 I took out half my towns power for 30 minutes with a bad scada command. It was my summer job before college and I went from cleaning the warehous

by cmos 14y ago

When I was 18 I took out half my towns power for 30 minutes with a bad scada command. It was my summer job before college and I went from cleaning the warehouse to programming the main SCADA control system in a couple weeks. Alarms went off, people came running in freaking out, trucks started rolling out to survey the damage, hospitals started calling about people on life support and how the backup generators were not operational, old people started calling about how they require AC to stay alive and should they take their loved ones on machines to the hospital soon. My boss was pretty chill about it. "Now you know not to do that" were his words of wisdom, and I continued programming the system for the next 4 summers with no real mistakes.

gnarbarian 14y ago
I'm interested in knowing some more details regarding the architectural setup and organizational structure that would allow something like this to happen.
- sophacles 14y ago
  Honestly, you don't. The IT engineering in power and other SCADA systems is downright scary.
  - gnarbarian 14y ago
    sounds like an opportunity to me.
    - sophacles 14y ago
      It's a hard space to break into. The businesses are conservative about any change, and new vendors are fairly un-trusted. Further, it is a bit different of a world than normal software realms, due to crazy long legacy lifetimes. Another problem is that the money isn't as big as you'd think, its a surprisingly small field. All that being said, there is opportunity, just not easy opportunity. And a huge number of the people in it are boomers, so there is going to be big shake-ups in the next decade or two.
- cmos 14y ago
  It was the small New England town I grew up in outside of Boston. Typically they manage their own power distribution, and purchase power from a utility at a rate fixed by the highest peak usage of the year, which tends to be 1:00 sometime in early August. I was setting up a system to detect the peak usage and alert the attendant to send a fax (1992) to our local college generator plant to switch over some of their power to us, thus reducing our yearly power bill by a lot. There was a title grabber in charge of the department, and a highly competent engineer running everything and keeping the crews going. That was my boss. Each summer I was doing new and crazy things, from house calls for bad TV signals from grounding to mapping out the entire grid. Oddly enough there was no documentation as to what house was on what circuit.. it was in the heads of the old linesman. Most of the time when they got a call about power outages they drove around looking at what houses were dark and what were not. Sometimes the older linesmen would call me on the radio to meet them somewhere, and we'd end up in their back yards taking a break having some beers. I learned a lot from those old curmudgeonly linesmen. They made fun of me non stop, but always with a wink and roaring laughter. Especially when I cut power to half the town.

by cmos 14y ago

gnarbarian 14y ago

I'm interested in knowing some more details regarding the architectural setup and organizational structure that would allow something like this to happen.

sophacles 14y ago
Honestly, you don't. The IT engineering in power and other SCADA systems is downright scary.
- gnarbarian 14y ago
  sounds like an opportunity to me.
  - sophacles 14y ago
    It's a hard space to break into. The businesses are conservative about any change, and new vendors are fairly un-trusted. Further, it is a bit different of a world than normal software realms, due to crazy long legacy lifetimes. Another problem is that the money isn't as big as you'd think, its a surprisingly small field. All that being said, there is opportunity, just not easy opportunity. And a huge number of the people in it are boomers, so there is going to be big shake-ups in the next decade or two.
cmos 14y ago
It was the small New England town I grew up in outside of Boston. Typically they manage their own power distribution, and purchase power from a utility at a rate fixed by the highest peak usage of the year, which tends to be 1:00 sometime in early August. I was setting up a system to detect the peak usage and alert the attendant to send a fax (1992) to our local college generator plant to switch over some of their power to us, thus reducing our yearly power bill by a lot. There was a title grabber in charge of the department, and a highly competent engineer running everything and keeping the crews going. That was my boss. Each summer I was doing new and crazy things, from house calls for bad TV signals from grounding to mapping out the entire grid. Oddly enough there was no documentation as to what house was on what circuit.. it was in the heads of the old linesman. Most of the time when they got a call about power outages they drove around looking at what houses were dark and what were not. Sometimes the older linesmen would call me on the radio to meet them somewhere, and we'd end up in their back yards taking a break having some beers. I learned a lot from those old curmudgeonly linesmen. They made fun of me non stop, but always with a wink and roaring laughter. Especially when I cut power to half the town.