Thursday night Mountain View power outage the result of a drone crash

http://www.mountainview.gov/news/displaynews.asp?NewsID=1168&TargetID=9

by stevewilhelm • 9 years ago

162 169 9 years ago

mountainview.gov

hellbanner2• 9 years ago

Thanks for sharing. More evidence that power lines should be under ground.

Can you really not fly your drone "around people"? I thought you could fly in parks.

devwastaken• 9 years ago

I thought power lines, in contact with the dirt, can make the ground electrocutive.

WJW• 9 years ago

Perhaps I don't understand what you mean by electrocutive, not being a native English speaker and all, but in my home country of the Netherlands over 90% of power lines have been underground since the 50s without any ill effects...

k-mcgrady• 9 years ago

Insulate them?

trentmb• 9 years ago

Downed power lines, yes.

benzofuran• 9 years ago

It creates a voltage gradient radiating out from the contact point. A gradient of more than 15VAC/m is generally bad news. The resistance can be enough to prevent automatic circuit protections from tripping as well if there's not a high current, such as dry high-resistance soil.

thomasgaukel• 9 years ago

You can fly your drone around people as long as those people don't include me.

eugenejen• 9 years ago

of course underground power lines will be more expensive for the moment.

So will drones produce more values than the cost to invest on underground power lines?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undergrounding

Advantages

    Less subject to damage from severe weather conditions (mainly lightning, wind and freezing)

    Reduced range of electromagnetic fields (EMF) emission, into the surrounding area. However depending on the depth of the underground cable, greater emf may be experienced.[2] The electric current in the cable conductor produces a magnetic field, but the closer grouping of underground power cables reduces the resultant external magnetic field and further magnetic shielding may be provided. See Electromagnetic radiation and health.

    Underground cables need a narrower surrounding strip of about 1–10 meters to install (up to 30 m for 400 kV cables during construction), whereas an overhead line requires a surrounding strip of about 20–200 meters wide to be kept permanently clear for safety, maintenance and repair.

    Underground cables pose no hazard to low flying aircraft or to wildlife.

    Much less subject to conductor theft, illegal connections,[3] sabotage, and damage from armed conflict.

    Burying utility lines makes room for more large trees on sidewalks,[4] which convey environmental benefits and increase property values [5]

Disadvantages:

    Undergrounding is more expensive, since the cost of burying cables at transmission voltages is several times greater than overhead power lines, and the life-cycle cost of an underground power cable is two to four times the cost of an overhead power line. Above ground lines cost around $10 per foot and underground lines cost in the range of $20 to $40 per foot.[6] In highly urbanized areas the cost of underground transmission can be 10-14 times as expensive as overhead.[7]

    Whereas finding and repairing overhead wire breaks can be accomplished in hours, underground repairs can take days or weeks,[8] and for this reason redundant lines are run.

    Underground cable locations are not always obvious, which can lead to unwary diggers damaging cables or being electrocuted.

    Operations are more difficult since the high reactive power of underground cables produces large charging currents and so makes voltage control more difficult.[citation needed]

    Whereas overhead lines can easily be uprated by modifying line clearances and power poles to carry more power, underground cables cannot be uprated and must be supplemented or replaced to increase capacity. Transmission and distribution companies generally future-proof underground lines by installing the highest-rated cables while being still cost-effective.

    Underground cables are more subject to damage by ground movement. The 2011 Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand caused damage to 360 kilometres (220 mi) of high voltage underground cables and subsequently cut power to large parts of Christchurch city, whereas only a few kilometres of overhead lines were damaged, largely due to pole foundations being compromised by liquefaction.

The advantages can in some cases outweigh the disadvantages of the higher investment cost, and more expensive maintenance and management.

Raphmedia2• 9 years ago

Here are the rules in Canada: https://www.tc.gc.ca/media/documents/ca-opssvs/Infographic_-...

"[Do not fly your drone:] closer than 75 m from buildings, vehicles, vessels, animals, people/crowds"

bdamm2• 9 years ago

In the US the law is that you MUST fly your drone within 121 meters of buildings, vessels, or the ground.

raverbashing• 9 years ago

Yes they should be

That being said, it's still the responsibility of the operator to not collide with anything in the air

joering2• 9 years ago

Thats most likely heavy guarded by lobbyist. On average while in transmit, power companies get 20% more of electricity just by putting cables in the air.

slm_HN2• 9 years ago

No, you cannot fly your drone over people. The exception being surveying construction sites as it is assumed that people on construction sites are already wearing hard hats.

Ironically parks, which would be an ideal place to fly, are often no-fly zones. For example all national parks in America ban drones as do many state parks.

loeg• 9 years ago

Ironically parks, which would be an ideal place to fly, are often no-fly zones. For example all national parks in America ban drones as do many state parks.

That doesn't stop people, in my experience.

astrange• 9 years ago

Most parks I've seen people try to fly in near SFBA are no-fly zones because they're too close to airports.

mtanski2• 9 years ago

Google search for "drone national park" and you'll find out why.

patorjk3• 9 years ago

You can fly them around people, you're just not supposed to fly them over people [1]. However, if you're flying commercially, you can get a wavier for this.

[1] https://www.faa.gov/uas/getting_started/

robbyking2• 9 years ago

Interestingly enough, almost all transmission lines in San Francisco are underground; almost all of what you see overhead are either telephone/cable, or overhead wires for powering MUNI, our municipal light rail.

astrodust3• 9 years ago

Long-haul lines in North America are rarely buried, the cost is too high. One notable exception is Quebec's grid which, after the disatrous 1998 ice storm which brought down a huge portion of their lines, buried them to avoid a similar catastrophe in the future.

lavezzi• 9 years ago

I mean wouldn't that be an issue for areas with tectonic activity? I wouldn't imagine they would be as easy to repair if they were under ground.

thaumaturgy3• 9 years ago

More evidence that power lines should be under ground.

I agree in principle, and there are places that do this, but there are a lot of practical considerations too. A neat story about what it's like when there's a failure in a big underground line: https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/net/user/tytso/archive/high-power

In California, you have problems with tectonic movement -- even small fault activity will stretch, relocate, and damage buried lines. In nearly everywhere else, you have underground water tables seeping in around your buried lines.

None of these are insurmountable, but they don't make it an easy job either.

hellbanner2• 9 years ago

DIdn't consider tectonic movement, good points

e9• 9 years ago

Interesting how they call this illegal because airport is within 5 miles. Airport is almost unrelated to this particular situation but I guess it's a concrete way to make person liable.

dmitrygr4• 9 years ago

The law states that FAA owns airspace and that flying within 5nm of towered airport without contacting tower is illegal. Simple.

foone• 9 years ago

I checked, and that means it's basically illegal to fly a drone in the bay area: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DB54FczUQAEQ5D6.jpg:large

libria• 9 years ago

Yes but I would still want applicable laws preventing drone instigated powerouts for the rest of the country not within 5 mi of an airport.

ouid2• 9 years ago

How do they measure 5 nanometers?

Sir_Substance• 9 years ago

Safe and efficient flight routes, like useful frequency spectra, are a high demand limited space quantity that can't be used by two people at the same time. To my mind, flying near an airport is actually the more troublesome crime, because people will assume it doesn't matter, but it definitely does.

An international flight system is only possible because a highly regulated system exists to ensure that a French plane flying east over Ukrainian airspace won't collide with a Norwegian plane going south, which is why all major flight plans are filed in advance.

If some scrub with $500 and no brain forces a plane to deviate from it's flight path to avoid sucking his $350 drone into its $12,000,000 engine, it could cause a chain-reaction of re-routing that costs tens of thousands of dollars in fuel and delay associated costs.

Don't fuck with airports. If you've got to scratch that public nuisance itch, go fishing with dynamite or something.

gugagore2• 9 years ago

Okay, but it doesn't make sense to me how a plane deviating (somehow) in order not to collide with a drone would affect any other plane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_(aeronautics)

ams6110• 9 years ago

Not really a big deal. Hundreds of airplanes deviate every day for weather, technical problems, medical issues on board, etc. Deviations are normal and accommodated.

dmitrygr4• 9 years ago

I hope they find the perp and hand him a reasonable jail sentence. A few decades should do. You CANNOT fly anything within 5nm of a towered airport without first contacting their tower. This was within 3nm of KNUQ.

This time he only hit a power line. Next time he'll collide with one of those 4-engine WW2-era trainer planes they fly out if KNUQ for practice at 500AGL...

cornstalks• 9 years ago

For anyone else who might be slightly confused (like I initially was), "nm" here means "nautical mile"[1], not "nanometer".

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautical_mile

SilasX• 9 years ago

Thank you! I was about to say, "yes, you cannot fly within 5 nanometers, due to Pauli exclusion forces..."

matt-attack• 9 years ago

Are you serious that you would advocate for a multi-decade sentence for what this man did?

dmitrygr4• 9 years ago

He could have brought down a plane on landing (moffet field flies planes low over mountain view often), cut power to a hospital, had the broken line kill someone. This action was easily more dangerous to society and those around him than driving a tank on city streets while drunk

Yes I am serious.

radarsat1• 9 years ago

Nanometers?

pm24601• 9 years ago

nautical miles

gugagore2• 9 years ago

You sound very passionate. "A few decades should do" to what? Make an example out of them? For restorative justice? To get back at them? To keep society safe from them?

bufbupa• 9 years ago

Surely you don't think a prison sentence is warranted for a nonviolent offense such as this? Maybe if he had flown the drone with the intent to hit a plane in that airfield, that might be a different story. But more likely, he may have just not known the law, or realized he was still in the offending zone.

That’s like saying we should lock people up who drive >15 mph over some speed limit that they didn't notice (which is also breaking the law). “This time he only hit a power line. Next time he’ll collide with a bus full of children.”

bjl7• 9 years ago

Its a little different here. He was clearly being exceedingly reckless, and power outages cost lives all the time.

Jail is probably excessive, a very hefty fine and a ban from flying drones again seems more appropriate to me.

patorjk3• 9 years ago

From what I've seen the distance is measured in regular miles [1,2]. Also, I'm not sure what him hitting the power line has anything to do with contacting the airports. Even if he had contacted them, they can only tell him no if they think he would "endanger the safety of the airspace" [3]. So if he had called, he could have just said he'd be flying at a nearby park. Additionally, most of the airports I call are totally clueless (ex: someone told me I couldn't fly a drone within 35 miles of DC - completely not true), and the FAA doesn't even provide a way to contact them. I had to download 3rd party apps to find this information. This guy messed up, but the FAA has created a bunch of complex rules that are hard to follow and provide little benefit.

[1] https://www.faa.gov/uas/where_to_fly/b4ufly/media/UAS_B4UFLY... [2] https://www.faa.gov/uas/where_to_fly/airspace_restrictions/ [3] https://www.faa.gov/uas/faqs/

maliker• 9 years ago

I bet 10 bucks that this gets written in to a Silicon Valley episode this season.

manningthegoose• 9 years ago

Probably next season. This season's already been shot.

Mz• 9 years ago

So, you just blew an easy ten bucks... ;-)

cdibona• 9 years ago

We have a bunch of drones in the title cartoon thing...

thaumaturgy3• 9 years ago

Ignoring the usual argument over drones vs. public safety:

It is absurd that in the US in 2017 this kind of damage can be caused by flying a relatively cheap device too close to power infrastructure. For the cost of a large-scale terrorist attack (http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/06/25/325240653/h...), a group of people could shut down a lot of public infrastructure in a lot of metropolitan areas, causing a lot of mayhem, and likely get away with it.

This seems like the kind of critical weakness of infrastructure that the current administration is supposed to be focusing on fixing.

taeric4• 9 years ago

What is your suggestion? By and large, society has gotten farther than folks realize by advantage of cooperation and a shared goal of peers. It has always been somewhat trivial to concoct a major threat to a lot of folks. Your local library has a ton of these ideas in the fiction section.

The expense of making things sabotage proof is substantial and hard to really accomplish completely. Even massive feats of engineering, such as the moon landing, all would have failed had a single actor been a saboteur.

js2• 9 years ago

In any case, the cause of most power outages is still squirrels. We'll be in real trouble when the squirrels learn to pilot drones.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2016/06/17/squir...

http://cybersquirrel1.com/

thaumaturgy3• 9 years ago

I agree with all of this, but would add that even the federal government describes power infrastructure with sentences like, "aging and ... being pushed to do more than it was originally designed to do" (https://energy.gov/oe/services/technology-development/smart-...).

I'm not a power grid engineer. I don't have the knowledge to make useful, specific suggestions. I do live in an area with semi-regular power outages, whether caused by demand (summertime AC usage), thunderstorm, falling tree branches, vehicle vs. pole accidents, and other major component failure (the occasional transformer light show or squirrel suicide-by-transformer). In every case, PG&E appears to be coming out and replacing failed equipment with ... identical equipment. To their credit, they do it fairly quickly.

I seriously doubt though that the current situation is the best they can afford to do, especially with the current political focus on infrastructure.

Houshalter7• 9 years ago

I agree with your point that terrorists aren't a real concern. I love this essay, Terrorism is not Effective which goes into much more detail on this: https://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20Effective

However sabotage is a real concern against rival nations. Iran basically lost their nuclear program because of sabotage. In world war 2 the Nazis were constantly set back by sabotage in many different areas. There are probably many more examples we don't know about because this stuff is usually top secret. The victims sometimes don't know it was caused by sabotage or don't make it public because it embarrasses them.

tomcam• 9 years ago

Here is my suggestion. Remember the $850 billion President Obama spent on nonexistent shovel-ready jobs? If we simply buried the nation's Powerlines as they do in Europe with that money this kind of thing would not happen nearly as often.

KirinDave2• 9 years ago

The entire world is not quite ready for what these devices are and what they enable. It's not surprising at all.

Also worth noting that the FAA has been trying to regulate these devices and that attempt failed in court. So right now the rules are incredibly lax, and most folks don't file flight plans because usually the folks at airports won't even talk to you when you try and call them about it (or so has been my experience).

But it's disconcerting, because its just not that hard to imagine someone using these devices for all sorts of previously unimagined crimes.

evilDagmar2• 9 years ago

This is in part due to the fact that many of these things are controlled over common Wifi and without modifying any of the equipment (in a manner that would violate FCC regulations) this sets a fairly low ceiling on how high they can go. Low enough that if an actual plane is flying that low, the aircraft's pilot is probably going to be in trouble with the FAA for barnstorming neighborhoods.

bsder5• 9 years ago

We are and continue to be vulnerable. Bruce Schneier used to run a competition about plots until he got too spooked with how vulnerable we are:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/movieplot_thr...

We are fortunate that terrorists, by and large, are dumb.

The solution is that you keep trucking along and you ignore terrorists. Many other things in life have a much higher probability of killing you, and you don't fret over them.

vacri• 9 years ago

We are fortunate that terrorists, by and large, are dumb.

How so? Drive a van into a crowd of people, and it's spread across the papers and people talk about it for ages. Cut regional power briefly and it's forgotten before next week.

jacquesm4• 9 years ago

We are fortunate that terrorists, by and large, are dumb.

No, we are fortunate that the number of real terrorists (those willing to follow through on their ideas) is small. If they weren't you'd know about it because there would be (a) many more attacks that succeeded and (b) many more arrests of attacks foiled.

The fact that both these numbers are extremely low is evidence for lack of terrorists, not for terrorists being dumb.

For a terrorist taking the power out is not sexy enough, slashing a bunch of people with knives or blowing up a bunch of schoolchildren is. See also: "If it bleeds, it leads".

matt_morgan• 9 years ago

I'm pretty sure that one drone causing a car crash that kills one person would be more effective terrorism than 20 drones taking out lots of electricity. I.e., you're right, it's just probably not what terrorists would do with drones.

stevenwoo• 9 years ago

They still haven't caught the people who attacked the power substation south of San Jose on purpose in 2013. There are so many of these things scattered around the country it's kind of difficult to protect without a lot of money.

http://www.mercurynews.com/2014/02/05/experts-sniper-attack-...

cjensen• 9 years ago

Worth noting: Mylar balloons are conductive and extremely effective at causing power outages. We've been living with this exact vulnerability for decades.

Undergrounding is very expensive, and does not protect against deliberate attacks on infrastructure. Ultimately, local power line cuts are merely an annoyance and it's not worth the effort to fix it.

BurningFrog• 9 years ago

When AT&T Park in San Francisco was opened some 15 years ago, festive mylar balloons killed the power in my office building nearby.

wpietri• 9 years ago

The specificity is misleading you.

My guess is that if you look at the giant basket of things a group of terrorists could do in the US with modest funding, this is pretty low down on the list of harms, and solving it would be very low down on the cost/benefit list of harm reduction options.

Power outages happen frequently regardless. We've reduced the frequency to a level where it's not a big deal. If they were a really big problem, we already would have hardened things.

jacquesm4• 9 years ago

You can not protect against this sort of thing. The whole point is that any kind of destruction vs creation is asymmetric and that the destroyers will therefore always have the edge.

The kind of damage that you could do to power infrastructure with a length of chain, a bolt cutter, a wrench or even a hacksaw is huge, the amount of money you'd have to spend to protect against such damage would be many orders of magnitude larger, possibly to the point that power generation / transportation would no longer be feasible.

The same goes for most forms of transportation (a rifle bullet in the right place will bring down a passenger aircraft) and all other things that we've created assuming that people will 'play nice'.

And that in turn links to a concept called the open society which most Western countries subscribe to and which is a combination of freedoms and a resulting vulnerability that we all feel is balanced quite well.

Killing people or destroying is super easy, and if we want to stop that from happening we will need to fundamentally re-think how we live. Personally I don't mind the risks given the advantages.

realo• 9 years ago

Of course you can protect those lines against drones: just bury them. Stop using aerial lines.

There are always issues, though. A few years ago, in my city, a neighborhood had an opportunity to vote for aerial or buried. Even though ´buried' made a lot more sense, they voted for aerial, because many feared "consequences" of being near the electromagnetic field of buried power lines.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt ... all caused by inadequate knowledge. That is the #1 problem to solve.

seanp2k26• 9 years ago

This. It's why the "war on terrorism" is a fool's errand, but that's also the point: the real reason we have a "war on terror" is to centralize authority for the government under the guise of protecting people. That so many have fallen for this pretty straightforward tactic is just disheartening.

CharlesMerriam2• 9 years ago

Ah. Fear. It's cheap.

We used to play a game in high school: "How to destroy the United States for less than $100,000." One obsolete example: destroying the six mammoth machines and two spares that processed all physical checks, bringing transactions to a halt for weeks. There were hundreds of ways.

Our greatest defense has always been being a reasonable people full of smart citizens.

patorjk3• 9 years ago

I love drones, it hurts to read something like this because I worry that the public's gut reaction will be to ban them. However, it's only a matter of time before these types of incidents add up. I think a step in the right direction would be for drones to communicate to some kind of central hub, that way responsibility for these types of things wouldn't be an issue, and people could more easily contact surrounding airports/helipads (ex: before you launch a signal could go out to the surrounding airports for notification).

bjl7• 9 years ago

I'm against a complete ban, but there should definitely be more restrictions than we have currently. Strict licensing requirements and a total ban on flying over private property (without explicit, written permission) seem like no-brainers to me.

Houshalter7• 9 years ago

I hate this attitude. Many of the great technologies we have today were pretty dangerous and feared when they first appeared. I honestly think if electricity or automobiles were invented today, they would quickly be banned. Drones could be incredibly useful for many purposes and your proposal would basically kill them.

pfarnsworth• 9 years ago

I think it's a no-brainer that people don't own the airspace above their property. Ban on flying over private property is absurd.

holycrapwhodat2• 9 years ago

Strict licensing requirements

I don't think there's any reason to prevent a hobbiest from flying a drone at lower altitudes over their own property. Wouldn't solve any problems and wouldn't gather any public support.

But drone pilots engaging in most other types of activity should be qualified, with some regulation.

That said...

A total ban on flying over private property (without explicit, written permission) seem like no-brainers to me

The airspace in the US above a certain altitude is legally public space. It belongs to everybody.

I'm a private pilot. With the exception of certain security sensitive areas and military operations, I can fly anywhere.

Busier airspace is "controlled" in that I have to be in contact with ATC, announce my intentions, and follow their instructions... but they can't prevent me from using the airspace.

I can take my small, slow Cessna to JFK and ask to land, and they have to keep my card on the board and slot me in when possible.

So, with almost no exception, I can fly over any private property legally.

A Recreational or Sport Pilot license is even easier to get than Private, and enables mostly the same situation wrt flying over private property.

Ultralight aircraft can be flown without any pilot licensing whatsoever. They cannot be flown over "populated areas", but this includes a vast majority of the country that is still "private property"

So my question is; Why should drones be so much more restrictive that actual person-carrying airplanes?

sharemywin• 9 years ago

Terrorist + Drone + powerline = I'm surprised we have power at all anymore.

ouid2• 9 years ago

Without power the drones won't work, so at worst we have dynamic equilibrium.

astrodust3• 9 years ago

Elon Musk rocking the boat.

PhasmaFelis3• 9 years ago

Temporarily knocking out power to a local area doesn't really instill terror. Maybe if we called them "nuisancists."

piinbinary• 9 years ago

I'm curious why a drone was able to cause any issue. Could a bird or stray piece of trash in the same area have caused the issue (was it a short?), or did it require the force of the spinning blades?

lightedman• 9 years ago

Squirrels, mice, rats, raccoons, and birds take out power stations all the time. Many transformer stations are exposed to open air for cooling, with nothing more than a fence topped with razor wire for a barrier. This makes for easy, easy entry.

paulddraper• 9 years ago

Sincere question: we've had RC model planes and helicopters for decades.

What about "drones" (I actually don't know if there is a difference; that's just the word I hear) is uniquely concerning to the FAA and the general public?

bsder5• 9 years ago

Simply: it took skill to pilot an RC plane or helicopter until the current round of autopilots.

The amount of time you had to expend until you could simply keep the thing in the air without crashing was large. This tended to keep the idiots out of the hobby.

With modern drones, there is no such entry barrier. Any idiot can throw a drone in the air and make it go somewhere.

msnower• 9 years ago

It would be interested to see how startups like SkySafe (https://www.skysafe.io/ - backed by a16z) respond to these kinds of incidents. I could see users of these startups wanting to create "no-fly" zones to protect assets of theirs such as powerlines.

I think as drones grow to become more common in our daily lives, the "Drone Security" industry will follow along.

deckar01• 9 years ago

Maybe drones should require liability insurance coverage. That should create a market forces that encourages safer drone technology.

Disclosure: I work for an insurance company and previously owned a commercial drone business.

thephyber• 9 years ago

Mandating insurance perverts incentives. Insurance wouldn't necessarily pay out the claim, putting the drone owner in a position of the liability (s)he is in now.

Also, this does nothing to change incentives for the electrical grid, which should not be nearly as brittle as it is.

That said, this is probably the simplest single solution to address what happened -- assuming anything should be done.

asynchronous133• 9 years ago

Also mandatory insurance for kites and balloons, either of which could have caused the same damage.

seanp2k26• 9 years ago

Especially kiteboarding kites (with sizes of 5-20sq meters) which are flown by Sherman Island right near the high-voltage power lines which also go over the river.

c517402• 9 years ago

This is timely:

https://xkcd.com/1846/

einarvollset• 9 years ago

This reminds me of a rather disturbing realization I had a few years ago. In places like the Bay Area, it would take only a small handful of non-violent protesters to completely shut down the major transit systems (aka the roads). All they'd need to do is to slow, stop and then park 3-5 cars in strategic places on 880, 80, 85, 101 and 280 and walk away. It would be mayhem.

imaginenore• 9 years ago

Angry people would quickly move them to the side.

Much more worrisome is snipers shooting industrial transformers, causing massive damage while spending close to nothing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack

dirtae• 9 years ago

It's already been done in the Bay Area: https://twitter.com/i/moments/689241776549269504?lang=en

neil_s• 9 years ago

Love that I can find my local news on HN

notadoc• 9 years ago

Personal drones are incredibly annoying at best.

I realize they can take interesting footage and have industrial uses, but at the consumer level they are never anything beyond a loud invasive public nuisance.

I'm sure in no time at all every self-obsessed youth will have a little selfie drone following them around broadcasting live too. Who would have predicted the future would be annoying narcissism?

Thursday night Mountain View power outage the result of a drone crash

Related Stories