Small Slug Blamed For Power Failure On Japan's High-Speed Rail Network (cnn.com) 65
Last month, Japan's high-speed rail network suffered a massive power outage that cancelled a total of 26 trains and delayed an estimated 12,000 passengers. The cause of the outage? A single, small slug. CNN reports: During a later inspection of the network's electrical equipment, the company's engineers discovered a dead slug, measuring about 2 to 3 centimeters (0.7 to 1.1 inches) long. According to a company spokesman, the slug had burned to death after touching an electrical cable leading to the mass power failure. Although it was discovered on May 30, shortly after the outage, the reason for the disruption wasn't revealed for more than a month.
add garlic butter and call it escargot (Score:5, Funny)
So...they found the bug.
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Maybe it's just me but... (Score:5, Informative)
if a small animal in the wrong place is enough to take out a large chunk of infrastructure, you need to improve your system.
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Dude, Japan. Have all their animated documentaries taught you nothing?
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I'm a bug too! :D
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I wonder how you say "single point of failure" in Japanese?
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All I know is that they yelled Gundam! or something similar when they found the toasty slug
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"the reason for the disruption wasn't revealed for more than a month"
It took them a month to make that shit up?
Re:Maybe it's just me but... (Score:5, Interesting)
This hits the news because outages are so rare.
I was in Japan when it happened, but not travelling by the Shinkansen high-speed train on that particular date and completely unaware of it. Those trains (250-300 km/h cruise speed) work on a metro-like schedule with 15 to 20 trains per hour and it is claimed that the average delay is about 25 seconds, including the effect of this kind of outages and earthquakes. Sixteen trains cancelled in a part of Japan means that service was interrupted for an hour.
Where I commute (the Netherlands), hour-long major outages happen several times per year and the stated cause is usually a "technical problem" or a suicide (takes usually 3 hours). I'll take the Japanese trains over the Dutch anytime. Also because of passenger behavior.
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This hits the news because outages are so rare....Where I commute (the Netherlands), hour-long major outages happen several times per year and the stated cause is usually a "technical problem" or a suicide
My experience is that's more-or-less how often it happens in Japan, too.
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I couldn't find the amount of downtime but if only 28 trains were cancelled it couldn't have been long. In any case, the system is designed to fail safe and that's what happened. You can't realistically have redundancy for some parts of the system, and even if you did it wouldn't help when say a large animal like a deer gets hit by a train.
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In Japan's train system, 26 trains would be considered a morsel, not a "large chunk".
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A small animal in the wrong place can take out *any* infrastructure. To think there's critical infrastructure anywhere in the world immune to this is just ignorance.
Have your checked the cyber squirrel map yet? https://cybersquirrel1.com/ [cybersquirrel1.com] why aren't you gardening your critical infrastructure against these advanced persistent threats?
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if a small animal in the wrong place is enough to take out a large chunk of infrastructure, you need to improve your system.
Then you'd be surprised by how often power or network outages can be traced back to an unhappy squirrel.
Think about the poor slugs! (Score:1)
This really needs better protection for the poor innocent animals.
Did they contract out to British Rail? (Score:1)
The wrong type of rain / leaves on the track / slug in a transformer. This is their MO.
Slug: COME AT ME BRO! (Score:2)
Just the cracked visual of this is funny as shit.
Watch that slug carefully (Score:4, Funny)
Are we sure the slug is dead? Because if Japanese cinema has taught me anything, it's that the electrified slug will suddenly grow to the size of a building and will go on a rampage, shooting electric bolts at everything until Godzilla stops it.
Not the only animal to cripple an operation (Score:2)
One squirrel got into an electrical substation just outside of Houston Hobby, there was hell to pay! The place was shutdown for several hours while the power company sorted things out.
The kicker was this was a handful of weeks after 9/11 and everyone was on edge. That damned tree rat didn't help matters any.
Re:Not the only animal to cripple an operation (Score:4, Informative)
Most power outages are caused like that. The reason you don't usually hear about them is they get zapped, fried and after the power is cut automatically, they fall off. Then about a minute later the recloser kicks in to re-power that part of the grid and if the squirrel fell off and no longer shorts out the lines, you end up with a brief power cut.
Reclosers are nearly everywhere nowadays - because so many outages are caused by small animals and power lines, or brief contact between power lines and trees. The problem is usually transient (animal gets fried and falls off, tree limb goes away) so reclosers eliminate the need for a truck roll and power is back in in a couple of minutes, versus hours with a truck roll.
You know you have a recloser when the power goes out, and it either comes on a minute later, or it briefly comes out then goes out a minute later. The former is when the fault clears itself, the latter is when the recloser powered it back on, and it faulted again. In this case, obviously it doesn't try again and just waits to be manually reactivated.
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Slug Corpse (Score:2)