Blackout After Drone Food Delivery Crashes Into Powerlines (abc.net.au) 81
AmiMoJo shares a report from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): Thousands of people were left without power after a food delivery drone crashed into powerlines yesterday in what has been described as a "first" by Energex. Energex spokesman Danny Donald told ABC Radio Brisbane people in Browns Plains, south of Brisbane, and the immediate surrounds lost power yesterday after a drone carrying food hit the network about 2pm. Energex restored power for about 2,000 customers within 45 minutes, while 300 customers in the immediate vicinity of that drone were without power for three hours. "The meal was still hot inside the drone's delivery box when the crew got there," Mr Donald said. "While this is a different circumstance, it's no different to the previous generation flying kites," Mr Donald added. "Fifteen years ago, we asked people to be careful if they were giving their children kites for Christmas and where they were flying them. Now we're asking parents to be very careful with where their kids fly their drones."
Blame it on the Kids, Got you on the Skids. (Score:4, Funny)
"Fifteen years ago, we asked people to be careful if they were giving their children kites for Christmas and where they were flying them. Now we're asking parents to be very careful with where their kids fly their drones."
Won't someone please think of the children?! Not exactly sure what 'kids' have to do with a company's delivery drone, but anyway....
Re:Blame it on the Kids, Got you on the Skids. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is how corporatism works. Because he works for a corporation, he doesn't want to say anything negative about another corporation, because he doesn't want to get sued for saying something true. And in Australia, while the truth is an absolute defense for libel or slander, the defendant has to prove the statement is true. At least here in America, the plaintiff has to prove that it is false. Either way it's better than the UK, where the truth is not an absolute defense; you can say something true, and if it was for the purpose of causing someone "harm" (which might be well deserved) then you can be at fault. But then, they still don't have free speech for visitors there, which is how we know the UK doesn't believe free speech is a human right.
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Nah Australian law is pretty much the same as the UK law. Free speech isn't about deliberately causing others harm, despite your interesting definition of freedom. These cases never seem to get past mediation so there isn't a lot of precedent. It has stopped a lot of the "we genuinely believed our lies were true and therefore he deserved it" defences. Time will tell if adjustments are needed. Murdoch press is a little more constrained than has been the norm so ....win!
Energex isn't a coorporation. It'
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Free speech isn't about deliberately causing others harm, despite your interesting definition of freedom.
Sometimes it very much is. That's literally the main reason why free speech has to be protected, because sometimes it can be used to harm those who need harm done to them. That is to say, those who would oppress us. If something saying something which is true can get you harmed then you've done something shit.
Any time the truth is not an absolute defense against libel, it's a shitty patch on a shitty culture. You can't fix underlying problems by making it illegal to talk about them.
Irony (Score:2)
Irony is when someone tries to suppress your speech about free speech and consequences because they disagree with it, most likely because they fear consequences for bad things they've done that they want to keep secret.
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This is how corporatism works. Because he works for a corporation, he doesn't want to say anything negative about another corporation, because he doesn't want to get sued for saying something true. And in Australia, while the truth is an absolute defense for libel or slander, the defendant has to prove the statement is true.
The ah, still hot food in the corporate-branded food delivery box attached to the corporate-branded drone, kinda seems like what we call here in America as "being caught red-handed" and tends to result in a "slam-dunk" case. There's a difference in taking a default defensive stance in support of local law, and sounding like an idiot.
To your point, even with this evidence, I would expect the corporate-branded guilty one to come back with a "that's not ours." default response.
I'd reconsider your laws. Or m
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*the laws. I get that you're not in the local area.
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That was a fair bit of irrelevant text.
What the facts are don't matter. What you say and how you say it might be legally actionable, so people don't say things even when they're clearly factually true.
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When a society finds they can no longer speak the truth out of fear, our entire conversation becomes irrelevant regardless of topic or situation. Calling for new laws or lawmakers, becomes your only option.
Bottom line is if Australian law is written that way, they should reconsider. The burden of truth being on the victim every time, hardly paints a message of justice in a world riddled with mega-corps who will not care about harm. Sadly, we're already at that point in some ways. Doesn't make it right.
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Bottom line is if Australian law is written that way, they should reconsider.
IANAL, especially in Oz, but that's what I found when I looked up "Australia libel slander burden of proof". Much of the world does not really have free speech. It is, sadly, grossly underappreciated... and even more frequently misunderstood. Free speech is exactly about consequences, and how they don't occur if people don't become aware of malfeasance.
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Very good points. You are correct. Quite misunderstood, even in the countries that appear to have Free Speech as a Founding Father Right.
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and the small sicker that says subcontracted to some small third-party delivery services that has no control has no funds to cover an damage bill this big.
Re: Blame it on the Kids, Got you on the Skids. (Score:2)
But at least the standard of proof, this being civil law, is just on the balance of probabilities. If you can't show that something is more likely to be true than not, should you really be publishing it?
Re: Blame it on the Kids, Got you on the Skids. (Score:3)
Nah children don't need to worry about it anymore with drones. See they're not like kites, they don't have a tether attached. They're free to knock out power to the neighborhood without fear of being electrocuted. That's progress!
Re: Blame it on the Kids, Got you on the Skids. (Score:2)
Also, toy drones likely won't knock the lamp plug out of the socket. Most of them now weigh less than 250 grams. A little plastic toy isn't going to do anything to the inch thick steel cable that supports a large power line.
This is like the dude is comparing a real dump truck to kids Tonka toy.
under the EULA the person who ordered will billed (Score:2)
under the EULA the person who ordered will be billed with the damage bill / fines that we get.
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Why no redundancy? (Score:2)
It looks like a single failure of a part of the power network caused a widescale outage. That means that there wasn't nearly enough redundancy in the system. Can't see any explanation of that in the article. Anyone any ideas? Grid underinvestment by privatized electricity utilities as ever?
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Trump, comrade?
Re:Why no redundancy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever considered that redundancy isn't guaranteed at all times? Or that different levels of redundancy cover different customer numbers?
Almost no power systems in the world maintain redundancy down to the individual customer which accounts for the 300 homes with an extended outage. The larger number which has a shorter outage implies that one side of the ring main may have been down for routine maintenance. If you were a large industrial customer you may receive a "notice of reduced reliability of supply", but as a consumer you don't hear shit about this.
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Ever considered that redundancy isn't guaranteed at all times? Or that different levels of redundancy cover different customer numbers?
Yes, absolutely. That's why I phrased a question instead of an accusation. If the answer was "at this exact moment we were overloaded beyond design load and temporarily using the redundancy to handle that, something that only happens twice a year on average" I'd happily shut up and not complain.
If they go beyond redundancy limits for some time on 80% of days, I'd be a bit less sympathetic.
Re: Why no redundancy? (Score:2)
Weird, because in my street, we had a tree drop on a local line. They disconnected that part and repaired it without any disruption because the supplies were fully redundant.
Re: Why no redundancy? (Score:2, Interesting)
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If you didn't have an outage as a result of that tree then it doesn't mean you had redundancy, it may have served others. If you did have an outage and they moved you to another line it doesn't mean you were "fully redundant". The ability to maintain service during disconnection and maintenance also doesn't imply "fully redundant" it implies they have a maintenance bus for the ring main.
And assuming you don't live in an area covered by a company who do no maintenance, even if you did have a fully redundant
it can take maybe 10-15 min for them swtich (Score:2)
it can take maybe 10-15 min for them switch an big number customers over to an differnt feed
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It can. When you work through a big list of assumptions you just made you absolutely can get power on that quick (and faster even). Make some different assumptions though and things start getting a bit more interesting.
Heck make enough assumptions (such as maintenance on a critical interstate interconnector) and you are able to turn off the power to all of South Australia for days.
Don't ever make assumptions, ask questions. I used to work in the electrical department of an industrial customer for Energex, w
Re:Why no redundancy? (Score:5, Insightful)
I so hope you're not serious. This drone landed on 11kV lines, not your basic (from memory) 415V distribution lines. While it did catch fire and there was current going across the drone it didn't actually knock the power out. It seems that the power outage was a switch off so that they could retrieve the drone and I presume the slightly longer outage which only affected 300 homes was so that the immediate network could be checked for damage. I'm sorry that the outage upsets you so but for some reason the technicians don't want to work close to live lines where touching them is your choice of any or all of severe burns, massive injury or death with the last option being heavily favoured.
Interestingly the drone belonged to Wing, so one of Alphabet/Googles little subs. A better article [theverge.com]
Re:Why no redundancy? (Score:5, Insightful)
He's serious anyway. The 415v network is not redundant down to individual consumers. It's silly to expect redundancy to a non critical end user.
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2000 customers is not an individual. That's big enough that IMHO there should be some basic redundancy in most situations. I'd say, maybe not in the outback where they might use generators for backup or something but in a normal city. I'd say this is still a question though, so maybe grid people don't worry about a small town worth like 2000 people??
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2000 customers is not an individual. That's big enough that IMHO there should be some basic redundancy in most situations.
Following that logic every street should have a backup street for "basic redundancy".
Same for water, sewer... fuck it - let's just have 2000 redundant homes for every 2000 redundant homes. With redundant families and all. But without the rabbits this time cause that is just stupid. [wikipedia.org]
Also, are you going to pay for all that?
Redundancy is fine, but installation costs are (at least) twice as high as well as the maintenance costs - which are forever.
You may not have figured it out just yet, but all those costs are
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2000 customers is not an individual. That's big enough that IMHO there should be some basic redundancy in most situations. I'd say, maybe not in the outback where they might use generators for backup or something but in a normal city. I'd say this is still a question though, so maybe grid people don't worry about a small town worth like 2000 people??
Such redundancy could be created, but it would be expensive. It would mean that for whatever block of homes you want to have redundancy for, there needs to be two separate sources of power and enough switching gear to to be able to connect or disconnect the block of homes from each power source. Usually at the neighborhood level such switching gear is manual - someone has to go to the power poll and manually throw a big switch. Since the power outage was only 45 minutes, in that time frame you would probabl
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Yeah, no. At some point the line has to be drawn. (pun intended)
Would you build a redundant water network? Gas network? Last mile telephony/internet?
At the very least you'd need to pay for the secondary network, which is at least half the price you pay.
A couple hour's worth of outage of any of these services should be survivable by anyone. If you can't, you plan for it (see hospitals and their backup generators).
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2000 customers is not an individual.
It is. 2000 customers are typically fed from single feeders at substations which themselves have redundant equipment ready for use but is not fully redundantly connected. These feeds typically go out to your pole top transformers which in lieu of redundancy feature things such as auto-reclosers which attempt to quickly get the power back on precisely because it is not redundant. That same substation would feature fully redundant feeders for large commercial customers only and would itself definitely be conn
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It is not "silly", but it would make electricity something like 50...100% more expensive. I am sure the nil-whit above would complain about that as well.
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I so hope you're not serious. This drone landed on 11kV lines, not your basic (from memory) 415V distribution lines.
Ok. My initial reaction from the summary is that power lines should just be buried since having them on poles seems to be more trouble than it's worth, even if the poles are cheaper. However that's not as easy for high voltage lines. They basically need an air gap around them, so you would need to dig a large tunnel to run them through. Maybe there's some other way to insulate them, but I can't imagine it being cheap. I suppose superconductors would be another option. It's been done, but only on a relativel
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Point taken there. On balance, it still seems like underground cables are going to be a lot less prone to most of the things that can go wrong. Of course, like with anything there are going to be tradeoffs, not to mention a wrong way to do things and a right (or at least better) way.
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the buried power line in front of my house failed a few months ago and it took them 12 hours to fix it with much of that time spent trying to both access the cable under the road and identify where the failure was so they could fix it.
How is that even possible? How does a circuit analyzer not tell them where the break is?
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Doesn't change that drone caused an outage for a lot of people, and that if we have a thousand times as many drones there will be many such outages and other drone caused mayhem. They also will be attractive target for hacking to cause major problems.
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Who the fuck up-modded this? Residential power does not have any sort of guaranteed redundancy at that level! 2300 residential customers going down is nothing out of the ordinary, it happens all over the world. 45 mins to restore most people and 3h for the last 300 sounds fine.
Now, if the entire state had gone down for hours, or a Nuclear factory had lost power etc, you could be asking "why no redundancy". Here, it's just idiotic to ask.
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We've had 40 years of budget cuts to go with the tax cuts for the executives and CEOs. The last 40 years we've shifted 50 trillion dollars to the top. That was the money that was going to pay for there to be redundancies in your power grid. It paid for Mark zuckerberg's yachts.
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I know it's frustrating when the facts get in the way of a political rant, but this happened in Australia, not the USA. They probably lack the necessary grid redundancy because drop bears keep eating the linemen.
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I know it's frustrating when the facts get in the way of a political rant, but this happened in Australia, not the USA.
It's all the same, they're massive fans of corporate welfare in Australia too. Plenty of free money for utilities, telcos and scumbag retailers in .au, under pretense of "grid upgrades," "broadband" and "coovid!!1!" respectively.
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Bullshit. You have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. And that is why there is no explanation regarding your not so bright question.
The fact of the matter is that redundancy for power-networks _is_ there. But it does work a bit differently than nil-whits like you expect. First, of course you have to have a circuit breaker in there. (Look it up.) The way these work for power-lines is that they switch off and then switch on again in case the short-circuit has burned off (squirrel, stupid human, et
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In this case the electricity network is owned by the Queensland Government.
Still hot? (Score:4, Funny)
"The meal was still hot inside the drone's delivery box when the crew got there,"
Even if it was cold, hitting live power lines would be a pretty good way to heat it up...
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Plus it would go from just regular to Extra Crispy!
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Plus it would go from just regular to Extra Crispy!
Careful. If they charge extra for that, you could be stealing.
Still... (Score:5, Funny)
Five stars. Would blackout again.
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Expected a cheap takeout. Got a nice romantic candlelight dinner.
Since this is a commercial venture (Score:4, Insightful)
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They will be. Ideally they lose their license to operate.
Once Again the Media Sensationalizes the Facts (Score:5, Informative)
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There are two ways aircraft come out of the sky: an intentional controlled landing, or a crash.
Are you saying that the company deliberately landed the drone on the power lines? If so, wouldn't that be a criminal act?
Would the outage have occurred if the drone didn't 'land' on the wires?
Why are you trying to downplay the incident?
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An unintended landing on something that immediately causes the destruction of the aircraft sounds like a "crash" to me.
A crash can happen even in controlled flight, e.g. controlled flight into terrain by an aircraft where the pilots are confused about their true altitude and/or position.
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A lot of explaining to do. Because the number one rule is to not work under the power lines you just fell out of. So someone has some explaining to do - because unless the drone was threatening a wildfire, it should not be approached during cleanup. The power company has to de-energ
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That's 100% correct comment providing the many assumptions you made while making it were true. And your comment is 100% based on assumptions.
Unless you're the drone operator... in which case learn to fly amateur :-P
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It might be easier just to list the things that don't cause a blackout in Texas...
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Are you serious? A drone hitting a power line in any way is a major massive failure on the side of the drone operator.
But did those wings get et? (Score:2)
Obstacle database (Score:2)
Power lines should be in a master obstacle map database along with their height above ground. Can't be that complicated.
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It's not that complicated once you make the map, but that's non-trivial. The power company isn't just going to give that data out for free, and it's also somewhat sensitive information. The same data that would tell drones where not to go also tells where to target terrorist attacks. Any government can process satellite photos to determine where the infrastructure is, but for smaller groups it's non-trivial to accomplish.
Over time no doubt drones will get smarter about not landing on stuff that isn't good t
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It's not that complicated once you make the map, but that's non-trivial.
It's easy. You just send some drones out to map all the power lines...
Delivery vehicles hit power poles all the time (Score:2)
Although an interesting story, the number of power outages from vehicles (including delivery trucks) hitting power is probably much greater. Just doesn't make the news. On the other hand, taking out your average street corner pole probably only knocks out power to a dozen or so homes. Drones can do it more efficiently and take out major (or minor) distribution lines beyond the reach of cars & trucks.
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Because the "grid" is more tree-structured than grid-structured when it comes to local lines, one truck can take out 2 houses or 2,000 houses (or more!) depending on which pole it hits.
openstreetmap has the big ones on it (Score:2)
openstreetmap has the big ones on it
What about capitalist free-market compensation? (Score:4, Insightful)
I rated a water outage at $50/household in inconvenience when I was worrying about water mains and how much to spend on them.
3000 people is probably 1000 households. Ding the delivery company $50,000 for the inconvenience they caused, plus a few thousand for the repair crew. With luck, put somebody out of business, pour encouragez les autres. Otherwise, private business will just make a tiny bit more money on reduced safety efforts, by causing major public costs, which cost them nothing.
Long term effects (Score:3)
This article is an instrument for outrage of this accident today.
6 months from now, all that will be remembered is "there's a company that delivers food with drones".
And even if the accident is remembered, a flying burrito immediately will probably seem worth the risk of a minor power outage, possibly just to other people, which last happened 6 months ago.