Initial comments about power outages and hurricanes.

As I said in this blog description, one of my interests is to study the effects of natural disasters on critical power infrastructures, such as the power grid or communication network elements power supply. My interest begun when I was studying my PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and my advisor, Dr. Philip Krein, asked me to participate in a research project studying the impact of Hurricane Katrina. Part of the study involved doing a damage assessment, during which I had the unique opportunity of seeing first hand how destructive hurricanes can be. Since then, I did 3 more damage assessments in 2008 after Dolly, Gustav, and Ike. During this research I started to figure out that there are many myths in how the effects of hurricanes on the power grid is usually considered. Some fundamental lessons are:
1) The power grid is a very fragile system. Damage to 1 % or less of the grid’s infrastructure can originate extensive power outages that can affect all customers in a very large area.
2) The grid is usually repaired in the same way that it was before being damaged by the hurricane, making it more or less equally fragile than it was before
3) Although wind is an important source of damage to the grid, the % of damaged power infrastructure elements do not correlate with wind intensity only. The more intense damage to the power grid correlates better with the storm surge than to wind.
4) The power grid is an inherently extremely vulnerable system because it has a centralized control and lacks diversity and redundancy in most of its sub-transmission and distribution paths.

So for a while, I have been having this idea of keeping an informal of the effect of power outages on critical power infrastructure. This idea grew stronger during the big wild-fires in California a couple of years ago and last winter the big ice storms. Today I will start with my attempt of doing so by trying to keep track of what Hurricane Felicia does to Hawaii and may be what Typhoon Morakot does in South East Asia.

Hurricane Felicia is now a Cat. 4 storm aiming at hitting Hawaii early on Tuesday morning. Fortunately, it seems that Felicia is going to weaken significantly before affecting Hawaii because, contrary to Iniki in 1992 that hit Hawaii from the south where the water is warmer, it should approach Hawaii from the east where water temperatures are below the 26C level to sustain a hurricane. However, Felicia is interacting with TS Enrique which may affect their forecasted path. In any case, soon the National Hurricane Center (NHC - http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/index.shtml)—actually the Central Pacific Hurricane Center at http://www.prh.noaa.gov/cphc/ —will likely start issuing watches and warnings that will provide a clearer picture of what is going to happen with this storm.

By the way, here there are some nice links I tend to follow about hurricanes and disasters:
Tropical weather: weather underground: (http://www.wunderground.com/tropical/). Their Hurricane Felicia page is: http://www.wunderground.com/tropical/tracking/ep200908.html. From there these are three interesting pics

I always learn a lot reading Dr. Jeff Master’s blog: (http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/show.html)

Some interesting pages related with hurricanes models, data, and forecasts are:
http://tropicalstormrisk.com/
http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/tropic2/ (for example, look in the bottom map for Saharan Air Layer Analysis in the Atlantic http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/tropic2/real-time/salmain.php?∏=splitE&time or the Low/Mid-Level Dry Air Tracking for the Pacific http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/tropic2/real-time/salmain.php?∏=splitW&time or the MIMIC-TPW (total precipitable water for either the Atlantic http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/tropic/real-time/tpw2/epac/main.html or the Pacific http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/tropic/real-time/tpw2/natl/main.html)
http://www.nlmoc.navy.mil/home1.html
http://www.wunderground.com/modelmaps/maps.asp?model=GFS&domain=TA (for example pull down the “Level” menu and look for Wind Shear in the GFS model http://www.wunderground.com/modelmaps/maps.asp?model=GFS&domain=TA – a good tutorial on wind shear is at http://www.wunderground.com/education/shear.asp?MR=1 where it is explained that in general wind shear should be less than 20 knots for a hurricane to develop)

Some nice maps for the Atlantic can be found at http://www.myfoxhurricane.com/
This, by the way, refers to the fact that the Atlantic has been very quiet this season. However, the Atlantic being so quiet is not something to feel too comfortable. Hurricane Andrew in 1992 didn’t develop until mid August.

Finally, a couple of pages mostly related with tornadoes and hail storms:
The Storm Prediction Center: http://www.spc.noaa.gov/
The National Weather Service: http://www.weather.gov/
And extreme tornados from Discovery Channel’s Storm Chasers: http://www.tornadovideos.net/