I was watching an episode of NCIS recently where all the power wend down in what was supposed to be a Federal Agency. Not just for a couple of minutes while the generators kicked in, but for several hours.
My question is, whether it is a realistic plot device to have a government, or any other building come to that, come to a stop because of a mains power failure.
Here in the UK I worked in hospitals, a medium sized office block, and a chilled warehouse which all had, and regularly tested, backup power capable of running all the important stuff.
Most hospitals in the U.S. have backup generators.
There are a LOT of federal office buildings in the U.S. There are some critical facilities that have backup generators but there are a lot of buildings that do not have generators.
The real NCIS is headquartered in the Russell-Knox building at the marine base in Quantico, VA. I don’t know what power generation capabilities are present on the base or in that particular building.
I worked at a hospital (IT dept) for 20 years and they not only have generators but mine was close enough to the local power utility that they also had their own devoted lines to it so they got back up sooner than anyone else.
But other than hospitals (and key national defense systems) I can’t really think of any place that would bother with backup generators. The US electrical grid is extremely reliable.
Maybe air traffic control systems would have them?
Unless the building house critical infrastructure, life support equipment or a data center, it’s not common for commercial buildings to have much, if any, emergency power. The environmental and perpetual maintenance issues are not insignificant. Generators need to be “exercised” fairly often, and neighbors tend to complain about noise.
My current office building has a few massive online UPS systems (IIRC, 750 kva three phase) to support the data center functions, but the office floors are a mix of offline generators or no backup at all. We’ve also got multiple utility feeds to reduce the chance of a full outage.
My previous building had online UPS and offline generator for the server labs, but the office spaces had no backups at all other than the individual emergency lights at exits.
When I worked in Ridley Mission Control Center, they had a back-up generator that they would ‘exercise’ regularly. I understood that it would start automatically in case of a power failure. RMCC is where data is collected during flight tests. Unlike a hospital, no one is going to die if the power goes out. Instead, it would be a very expensive inconvenience.
Many larger buildings and most hospitals have emergency generators. but they are not full load generators in most buildings. The generator provides enough emergency lighting to “egress” (exit) the building. And power at least one elevator in each bank of elevators. All the stairwell lights should be on an emergency circuit. In a hospital in addition to the above all the critical service areas are normally full on emergency service. That is surgery, emergency room, labor and delievery, ICU, CCU, and any other care unit. And any room where critical equipment is plug in should have an emergency circuit in it.
If you are in an building with an elevator and the power goes out stay put DO NOT TRY AND GET OUT OF THE ELVEATOR ON YOUR OWN! What happens varys from building to building and if you try and get yourself out you can get hurt or kill your self or you can break something and then be stuck until a service mechanic can get you out. If the system is not full automated it may take time until the elevator can be brought down to the ground floor so you can get out but you are safe inside the car.
The type of generator or generators vary from building to building along with the emergency distribution system. I worked in a hotel where there were no emergency lights in any of the customer’s rooms, dumb. and I worked Letterman Digital Arts center one building three generators and another building had two generators both had no emergency distribution system. When there was a power outage the generators started synced together, open the main then closed the emergency cross connect and the whole building was on the generators.
Normally the generators in buildings with good crews are exercised weekly under load. Many buildings they are not and when there is a power outage those are the buildings with failures.
The previous company I worked at making cell phones had a backup generator on site. We had certain outlets in our cube that were marked as generator power…computers and such were plugged into those.
Unrelated to that…down here in hurricane country, lots of buildings have backup generators. Some gas stations and grocery stores are required by law to have them. Lots of people have them for their houses, too…but not necessarily the automated kick-in style.
I work for the US government. We have UPS’s for our servers and desktop computers; however, they aren’t good for more than a couple of hours. It allows us to gently shut down the computers if the power is out more than a few minutes. Of course the work I do isn’t super mission critical.
The main server building on base has three emergency generators. Two of those generators are suppose to be enough to keep the servers running.
I work for a healthcare organization. Our main data center (containing all the critical hospital computer systems as well as financial systems, email servers, etc.) has power feeds from two different utilities, a battery backup sufficient to power the entire DC for several hours, and diesel generators with a three day supply of fuel.
After Hurricane Andrew in south Florida in 1992, a lot of gas stations installed stand-by generators. I believe (but am too lazy to check, for purposes of this thread) that there was some official mandate to that effect in Miami-Dade County. Andrew left many, many people without power for weeks, some even months. We were surviving using generators, which run on gasoline. Gas stations all over the area had tens of thousands of gallons of gas in underground tanks, but couldn’t pump it out to those of us needing it for generators – because the stations didn’t have generators to power the pumps! We had to drive for miles and miles, outside “the zone”, to get gas, wasting precious gas. Later, many grocery stores also installed generators, presumably because selling perishables to powerless victims would be more profitable than closing stores and throwing away huge quantities of rotting food.
Would the building have generators? People have covered this aspect: probably not but it really depends on what’s in there
Would the building’s generators have taken “several hours” to kick-in after a power outage? Completely unrealistic.
Buildings with generators test them frequently, once a month at least, and unless the install was entirely incompetent the building will usually be able to switch from power company -> battery -> diesel generator so fast and seamlessly the lights won’t even blink.
BTW, would the NCIS building have a morgue? That would need a generator. But who knows if it would be wired-in to any other parts of the building.
That’s similar to where I worked, a data center for a large 300+ bed hospital (and two smaller regional ones). If I was actually in the data center (i.e. on the raised floor) I would *always *know the instant the power went out because the battery backup units (which were nearly the size of cars BTW) could **not **power the data center’s air conditioning. Needless to say you notice when a raised floor’s A/C system goes off (it goes from sounding like the deck of an aircraft carrier to near silence!) The air conditioners had to wait for the diesel generator to kick on which would take an additional 15-30 seconds.
Thing is, at the place I worked when the power went out it would always trip the air conditioner’s breakers, which meant that the A/C wouldn’t turn back on even when the genny kicked in. I would have to set the two A/C units’ local control panel to ‘off’, then go into an electric closet (which was locked so first I’d have to get the key at the secretary’s desk) and then push (and I mean PUSH!, those high-amperage breaker levers were huge!) the breakers from tripped to off then back to on. Only then could I go back onto the raised floor and turn the A/C units back on.
And if it was a hot summer day I had to do all this fairly quickly, because even though the IBM mainframe (a z/OS unit) wasn’t that sensitive to heat, the rest of the room was filled with nearly a hundred Windows rack servers, and just like any PC they fail quickly when not cooled enough (within less than 60 seconds of the A/C shutting down you could feel it getting hot in the data center!)
Soounds like you have a problem in either the electrical distrobution system or the HVAC system. Either poor maintenance or design. Keep tripping those big breakers and one day they are going to fail and not reset.
It would depend on the maintenance crew. I know of one hospital that the generator failed. The fuel oil transfer pump did not work. The crew could not even figure out how to do an emergency fuel oil transfer by hand. The whole hospital went dark.
I work in a building where the generator is tested weekly, but the boss will not transfer the load to the generator so the ATS (automatic transfer switch) and the generator never get a load test.
Other than data centers the lights do blink. Few buildings have battery back up.
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I work in a building where the generator is tested weekly, but the boss will not transfer the load to the generator so the ATS (automatic transfer switch) and the generator never get a load test.
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Ever? Yikes… The last datacenter I was at exercised the generator monthly and did a full system exercise once a year. IIRC, they’d run the entire building on generator for an hour. Not only did this test the generator and transfer equipment at load, it also tested fuel delivery as they would not give the fuel company advance notice of the test. Sneaky.
The only thime the generater is run under load is a power failure and once a year a load bank is brought in and a full load is put on the generator. And a service company tests the main ATS once a year. I feel that it should be done at least once a month if not weekly.
