Hurricane Ida cancellations

New Orleans closing due to flood gate being placed. Wonder if last trips will fill up and will Amtrak remove all rolling stock ?
https://www.amtrak.com/alert/service-to ... e-ida.html

Need to watch Monday for CoNO in Memphis. May be tropical storm by then. Tuesday into TN and headed east.

It may be that some NOL based personnel will not be able to man trains. That can be a possible problem due to the system wide on train personnel shortages ?

More likely some possible track washouts. Tidal surge plus feet of rain coming down? I won't be surprised if the City of New Orleans hit an alligator.

And to think I wrote a bit about this in my novel...

Inbounds to NOL cancelled thru WED, So no departures till Thursday. Suspect cancellations will last longer due to power problems ?. Wonder why the ppower plant in NOL city failed ?

I don't think it is so much the "electricity factories" as the distribution network. Here is a tweet & gallery
from Entergy. Obviously we should hire Waffle House to design our power grid:

Entergy New Orleans
@EntergyNOLA
·
16h
#HurricaneIda was one of the strongest storms to make landfall in Louisiana and retained hurricane status nearly to Mississippi. Here is a gallery showing some of the damage: http://enter.gy/6017yaEzH

I wonder what impacts we will see in the Northeast. Half a foot of rain is being called for in the interior parts of the northeast. A fellow Keystone Service passenger was joking of whether it would flood in Mount Joy again stranding them. That was 11 inches when that happened, but a half a foot would seem likely to cause problems in spots.

west point wrote: ↑Tue Aug 31, 2021 8:35 am Inbounds to NOL cancelled thru WED, So no departures till Thursday. Suspect cancellations will last longer due to power problems ?. Wonder why the ppower plant in NOL city failed ?

What power plants? It's being fed in from outside the city... or was. Ida knocked down a major electrical grid feeder tower! Most of the pumps are now on generator power.

There is a 200 MW natural gas power plant on the east side of NOL . It is a black start facility. Now is reported that the transmission lines from the plant to downtown NOL are down and so it cannot provide power to even essential services. The plant was to be used if NOL city became a power outage island. Also has been used for a peaking power demand facility. reports vary but full needs for NOL is at least 800 M Watts . So that plant will not be enough for all of NOL once it can start providing some power. However it is unknown how many MWs would supply those customers that can use power right now.

This is another power system failure on top of the failure last winter in Texas.

Some Katrina lessons seem to be learned. The ~ $40B spent on the levee system appears well spent money. No apparent levee failures. Only a few pumps not operating mostly due to routine maintenance/. Cannot say electric utility learned those lessons. IMHO They should be required to rebuild towers and poles to 180 MPH gusts or burry the lines. It is becoming all too evident that electric utility grid system(s) are not up to snuff. California, Oregon, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida , Georgia utilities have all fed too much capital to stockholders. Sound familiar ? RRs !t

Is it cheaper to bury all the lines or replace them every 16 years? Also, they need to restore as quickly as possible which means rebuilding poles & wires then bury them later which means doing the work twice. What is the impact on Amtrak / Freight? If the tracks are clear, not flooded or washed out they could run in "dark territory" with each crossing flagged...

BandA wrote: ↑Wed Sep 01, 2021 1:13 am Is it cheaper to bury all the lines or replace them every 16 years? Also, they need to restore as quickly as possible which means rebuilding poles & wires then bury them later which means doing the work twice. What is the impact on Amtrak / Freight? If the tracks are clear, not flooded or washed out they could run in "dark territory" with each crossing flagged...

You have to remember, these are like MEGA-watt, high voltage lines. It may not be safe enough to bury the lines. I don't know if there's any studies on it or not.

STrRedWolf wrote: ↑Wed Sep 01, 2021 9:45 am

BandA wrote: ↑Wed Sep 01, 2021 1:13 am Is it cheaper to bury all the lines or replace them every 16 years? Also, they need to restore as quickly as possible which means rebuilding poles & wires then bury them later which means doing the work twice. What is the impact on Amtrak / Freight? If the tracks are clear, not flooded or washed out they could run in "dark territory" with each crossing flagged...

You have to remember, these are like MEGA-watt, high voltage lines. It may not be safe enough to bury the lines. I don't know if there's any studies on it or not.

Underground transmission at 345kV is used in northeastern NJ for a few circuits. There is no technical reason why 500kV or even 765kV transmission lines could not also be underground, and perhaps some are in places. The cost which would be passed onto enduse customers would be very high, and given that the distribution (less than 100kV) circuits typically are badly damaged in a severe storm, some or even a lot of, transmission line outage is generally not problematic as the end user customer load demand is very low due to distribution system damage. With respect to islanding, only some generating stations are capable of running in load following mode so several operating generating stations may be required in an island configuration in order to keep generation and customer load in perfect balance at all instants of time.

STrRedWolf wrote: ↑Wed Sep 01, 2021 9:45 am You have to remember, these are like MEGA-watt, high voltage lines. It may not be safe enough to bury the lines. I don't know if there's any studies on it or not.

Most high voltage transmission lines feeding power into major cities are at least 345 kV.
https://cdn.misoenergy.org/20190212%20P ... 317692.pdf
The per mile costs to build a 345 kV single circuit varies from $2.5 million to $3.1 million per mile.
The per mile costs to build a 345 kV double circuit varies from $4.3 million to $5.0 million per mile.
These are both above ground transmission lines.
https://gridnorthpartners.com/wp-conten ... -Lines.pdf
Under ground 345 kV double circuit transmission lines costs average between $39.8 million and $43.9 million per mile.

To go underground vs above ground costs about 10 times higher. Would you like to pay 10 times more for your electricity if all of the above ground transmission lines were rebuilt underground instead? Nah, I did not think you would.

The key point of that argument was rebuilding all of them. but underground transmission lines are built in environmentally and politically sensitive areas, for a few miles at a time. But hurricanes along the US coasts do not strike in just a few selected miles, they can strike anywhere along the 3600+ miles of the Gulf and Atlantic coastlines.

It isn't even just a matter of burying power lines. One photo showed a substation underwater. Even with all your wires underground somewhere you have a substation with some type of switchgear and transformers. If such facilities get flooded you're looking at big time outages.

With so much of Southern Louisiana barely above sea level, I wouldn't think underground transmission is an option due to perennial flood risks and the low water tables.

It's hard enough keeping bodies in the ground at cemeteries... having power line encasements floating up would be deadly.

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