Power Failure (Portland, Gresham: how much, income, food)

[Beenhere4ever]

Been reading on Facebook and Twitter about unusual heat in Portland. One favorite food truck has even shut down due to intolerable heat inside the truck. Now I read that US Bank lost its ATMs due to what it reported as a "power failure in Oregon". So then that made me wonder if this heat wave caused a brownout there or something. I worked for years in IT at US Bank. That experience doesn't allow me to infer how power problems in Oregon could cause an ATM failure all over the network, unless the server support for the ATM's has changed in the last year. I know the mainframes provide certain functions which go down for short periods during weekly IPLs, but at no point are they normally unable to provide basic functions. So if a power outage truly takes them down, that is something out of the ordinary. And I've been there when it happened and its like a maximum emergency because the biggest corporate customers are rankled. I'm wondering if the larger community has had problems commensurate with what hit the banking company. Any other companies have to take emergency measures? Hospitals on generators?

[Larry Caldwell]

I suppose it's possible. There have been a few local outages. The largest I know of affected about 26,000 customers for a few hours because of a transformer failure. Generally our electrical grid is in pretty good shape. There's plenty of water in the Columbia, and so much electricity on the grid that they were actually shutting down wind turbines last spring because they couldn't use all the power.

[hamellr]

I think most likely US Bank has a central network node in the area, which may have been without power. My guess is that was most likely the Pittock Building if anywhere. That place is way over loaded for what it's got downstairs.

But power events usually happen in winter, ice on the transmission lines causes breakage. When I was a kid a freak storm came up in the 80's and caused us to go without for almost two weeks.

But brown outs in the summer are rare, I've certainly never experienced one directly.

[Beenhere4ever]

The Ops center for US Bank is way out in Gresham. I've visited it. And I always thought the ATM support was redundant in many ways since SO much USB income these days is fee-based. Well, things there have surprised me before. Like the time a car hit a phone box in St Paul and caused a huge rerouting to happen till Qwest could replace it. Couldnt believe how much of the corporate empire was riding on that one little box. Does put a premium on crisis recovery. But now all that stuff is in Olathe KS, so drunken drivers won't get a shot. I should probably look up USB on Facebook to see what they do there.