When the lights went out Tuesday on nearly 1 million San Francisco Bay Area residents, the blackout served as a warning of what might happen in a society dependent upon electricity for basic services and commerce.
"This could very well be a reflection of a Y2K disaster that's not properly managed," said Nancy Wong, a PG&E executive on loan to the US Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office.
"It's another reminder of how tremendously dependent everyone is on power," added Peter Neumann, a critical infrastructure expert and the author of the book Computer Related Risks.
"It's kind of a harbinger of the Year 2000 problem. We're in practice mode right now."
An electrical power substation about 20 miles south of San Francisco failed shortly after 8:15 a.m. Tuesday, causing a chain reaction that tripped the two main power generators in San Francisco and knocked out power to 375,000 utility customers in a 49-mile square area. Pacific Gas and Electric estimated that 938,000 people were affected by the six-hour outage.
Neumann said one of the issues facing the information society is that power itself is in increasingly less supply at the dawn of the millennium.
"The entire power generation, transmission, and distribution problem is suffering, because there is very little spare power anymore," he said.
Therefore, backup power supplies that once filled in during outages are also less available, Neumann said. The reason is simply greater demand.
The information age -- with its computers, appliances, networks, communications systems, and more -- eats power, using up what used to be a stand-by supply.
There is a similar drain on what used to be extra bandwidth and switching in the telecommunications infrastructure, Neumann said.
"This sounds like a very unusual situation," said Wong. "The utility companies such as Pacific Bell and PG&E have a lot of disaster recovery plans to bring power back as quickly as possible. This sounds like something that happened unexpectedly."
Wong said that companies and city officials should think of Tuesday's blackout as a cautionary tale.
