Edmund Storms <[email protected]> wrote: Jed, you probably know that to fix a line the power to the entire line has > to be turned off. That would turn off power to many more people than > initially. >
Yes. You can watch the area affected grow and then shrink as they fix the problem. Select "zoom in" on one of the icons and you can see exactly which streets are affected. However, what I was remarking on is the fact that the work can only be done in parallel to a limited extent. We have thousands of extra work crews in Atlanta. Probably more than we need, because the storm was not as bad as anticipated. So far, anyway. I expect there are more than enough crews. Yet despite all these extra work crews, there are many outages affecting 51 to 500 customers (the yellow triangle marker) which have not been fixed all day. I assume someone is working on them, but some things can only be done at a certain pace. You could not fix an outage more quickly by dispatching ten extra trucks. This is similar to the theme of the book, "The Mythical Man Month." That is about programming projects. It makes the case that throwing extra programmers at a project may slow it down rather than speed it up. It may also degrade quality. The Atlanta Journal (AJC) reports that 225,000 people have lost power, but 50,000 are already back on line. The Georgia Power website numbers are still climbing in most of the 15-minute iterations. The total is now 1,735 outages affecting 131,490 customers. There are other power companies in Georgia, with an additional 60,000 customers affected. These are mostly electric power cooperatives, says the AJC. - Jed
