[SystemSafety] power failure at Belgocontrol

Wed May 27 22:20:35 CEST 2015

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On 2015-05-27 21:00 , Gergely Buday wrote:
> The power cut was due to an overvoltage, which also damaged emergency generator switches.
> "Normally, the generators should take over, but because the excess current broke the control
> switches, this was rendered impossible. It was like Murphy's law", said Mr Dehaene.

Electrical safety is one of the first engineering areas to be standardised, 120 years ago.
Protective devices work (if they are installed). It's got to be a pretty amazing high voltage that
gets through the protection to the switches themselves. Lightning can do it. But that's a
localised effect, rather than the more general one that is being reported.

I've been in contact with Flight Info at a regional US airport, Redmond in Oregon, when it
received a direct hit on its kit from lightning in a non-trivial convective storm cell, and was
back up (with auxiliary generation) within a couple of minutes of the hit.

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de