I didn't hear a thing

A substation exploded and burned this morning. I was on the bus at the time, and didn't hear a thing. The driver stopped to talk to some people in uniform who were staring down the road, and said "you guys need to go fight the fire." We drove by the fire--the road wasn't blocked yet, but sirens were converging from all over.

I didn't get to work quickly because the bus re-routed around State Street for "Maxwell Street Days," but when I did I saw an urgent bulletin warning people to evacuate Ogg Hall on campus because a substation had caught fire there. I mentioned this to my colleague, and the lights went out.

The powers that be still don't know what caused the breakdowns, but it wasn't hot yet, so load wasn't the main issue. Thunderstorms might have left some components in a dicey state.

Or, with 2 fires at about the same time, somebody may have been sabotaging the system.

MG&E warned that it might take a couple of days to restore power, so I went home. I should have walked to the car--I waited for the #6 and it never showed. Traffic lights were out all over downtown, all the buildings on the square had no power--even the Capitol, I think.

Of course, this afternoon the power came on briefly, and finally continually, and so the people that stayed put had a pile of problems to deal with that I was placidly sleeping through.

It's ironic. I wasn't feeling well, but I went in anyway to manage the migration of a special server(*) to a new IP address. About four people were going to be monitoring the transition to make sure the downtime was as short as possible--a minute if we were very careful. Instead we got a 10 hour downtime.

One campus building has cameras: there's a time-lapse video from it.

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(*) The server is a relay to send supernova alerts to/from our detector to other astro experiments around the world. If one of them sees something interesting, the rest take a close look. Luckily, I don't think any alerts were blocked.