Service outage

K6 Are continuity plans in place to address critical service outage ... 

Service outages can be a significant source of risk particularly when systems are relied upon to deliver information which is used to support immediate care. System unavailability should be expected and planned for as no service is 100 % reliable. 

Typically, telecommunication networks ability to avoid or cope with random failures is measured in three ways (Snow et al. 2000) Reliability, Availability, Survivability. Reliability is the probabUity that a network performs a designated set of functions under certain conditions for a time greater than a specified operational time. Availability is the probability that a network performs its functions at any given instant imder certain conditions. Survivability measures the abihly of a network to perform its functions given network infrastructure component failures, resulting in a partial service outage. 

Federal Aviation Administration, National Maintenance Control Center AOP-100. 1997. Adhoc Report of facihty/service outages associated with cable cuts, 7/1/95-8/22/97. 

The NERC GADS ten-year review report for 1971-1980 on equipment availability presents statistical data sets on the performance of major types of electrical power generating units. Cumulative and unit.-year averages are calculated on such quantities as service hours, available hours, scheduled outage rate, mean time between full forced outages, shutdown because of economic reasons, and probability of outage. The number of start demands and successful starts are included. 

For locations in the Middle East subject to wide fluctuations in ambient temperature it has been common to utilize multiple gas turbines which are sized to meet the plant demands during the hot summer months and the cold winter. As the gas turbine output increases substantially, there is sufficient spare capacity to allow for outage of machines without affecting the electrical power export. However, this situation is unique to the environmental conditions and type of equipment in service. 

Insurance inspections and cleaning programs further add to the frequency at which a boiler may be out of service. During these outages and offline periods, the boiler metal waterside surfaces are especially susceptible to rapid corrosive attack and damage. Consequently, various protection protocols are employed to stave off this risk. The primary factors responsible for downtime corrosion are ... 

Wet lay-up programs are therefore used to protect standby boilers. These are essentially the same programs used to protect idle boilers that may be out of service for perhaps 30 days. (Boilers having outages of longer than 30-day periods generally are subjected to dry lay-up programs.)... 

Standby power - Power during system outages is provided by a distributed generation system until service can be restored. This is used for customers that require reliable back-up power for health or safety reasons, companies with voltage sensitive equipment, or where outage costs are unacceptably high. 

In turn, EHS will typically refer to a disaster as a natural or man-made phenomenon that results in the destruction or dysfunction of the available response infrastructure to meet the community s need for health care (ASTM F-30 Committee, 1996 Auf der Heide, 1989 Emergency Medical Services Committee, 2001 FEMA, 1992). Thus in the case of a hurricane or power outage, only a few injured people may require medical care however, because the health system infrastructure may have been destroyed, the disaster may clearly require outside assistance to meet the health care demands of the community. This type of disaster is sometimes referred to as a paralytic disaster because it has the potential to eliminate the EHS s ability to respond to any call for services, let alone extra demands for care resulting from the event. 

Rand, D. A., Mener, D. J., Lerner, E. B., DeRobertis, N. (2005). The effect of an 18-hour electrical power outage on an urban emergency medical services system. Prehospital Emergency Care, 9, 391-397. 

The value of backup power is as much as three to four times the value of primary power on a kilowatt basis. For example, the lifecycle cost of the backup power systems found at the base of a cell tower, which now consists of a bank of lead acid batteries and a diesel or natural gas fired combustion engine, is between 3000 and 4000 per kW. Critical power facilities for data processing centers and the like are also in this cost range. The simple fact is that customers need electricity and will pay a considerable insurance premium to obtain assurance of uninterruptible power. In the case of cellular phone service providers, their federal FCC license may be at risk if they are unable to demonstrate adequate operating capability in the event of grid outages. 

It ran for 1,666 onstream hours (69 days) with only 27 hours of scrubber-related outages. The scrubber was also out of service 146 hours when Unit 10 came down for replacement of a broken turbine thrust bearing. 

The run began on September 26, 1978 and terminated on November 2, 1978, for a total of 833 onstream hours (35 days). During the run, the scrubber was out of service for 48 hours due to a boiler outage caused by a tube leak, 5 hours for a scheduled inspection, and 8 hours for unscheduled outages to clean and repair the scrubber induced-draft fan damper. Excluding boiler outages and scheduled inspections, Run 932-2A operated with an onstream factor of 99.0 percent. As was typical of all long-term rims, the scrubber was more reliable than the boiler. 

The system was onstream for 1,688 hours. During the run, the scrubber was out of service for 78 hours due to equipment problems and 84 hours due to boiler outages. Excluding boiler outages, Run 917-1A operated with an onstream factor of 95.6 percent. 

A power outage, also known as a blackout, is often referred to by power companies as a disruption in service to appease the possibility of panic. The term power outage gives little hint of when the power might return and in fact, it sounds as if the power will be out indefinitely. On the other hand, a disruption in service implies the power is only out temporarily— something has gotten in the way of its service, but that the disruption will be fixed soon. 

In complete service failure, the entire system is typically unavailable, a situation which is often called an outage. This type of unavailability may of course be either planned or unplanned and may be expected or unexpected by the individual user. Service failures are often due to catastrophic hardware failure where insufficient redundancy has been employed. The clinical risk is determined by a number of factors ... 

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