Schoellkopf Power Station Disaster – a history | Hacker News Reader

Schoellkopf Power Station Disaster – a history

niagarafrontier.com

54 pointscf100clunk15 comments

It strikes me that the workers stayed in place far longer than one might expect today. It’s hard to imagine a crew continuing to work when the floor is buckling, windows breaking from the stress, and so forth.

Today, I’m pretty certain everyone would be ordered out at the first hint of impending structural failure. A lot has changed in 65 years.

Behaviour during an emergency is strange. Lots of people will keep on doing what they habitually do. After the twin towers were struck there were lots of people who were still working on their computers when emergency services came to get them, according to reports I read at the time.

One of the first things to do if you come on an emergency is to either call 911 (or insert appropriate emergency number here) yourself, or direct someone specific to do it. "You. Do you have a cell phone? Call 911." It's quite common to discover that even with a decent sized crowd around an event, nobody has actually called emergency services, because everyone assumes someone else has done it. Better to annoy the 911 operator with "Are you calling about the XYZ at the corner of A and B? Yes? Already reported, emergency services are on the way." than to have nobody contact anyone.

Humans in emergencies are weird. I absolutely agree.

And in the context of this article, were the floor buckling, I'd be making haste to get myself and everyone else who would listen out of there ASAP. Nothing good comes of this sort of progressive failure.

What you describe sounds a lot like the 'bystander effect' which occurs a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect

In this very article, the guy says that he was jumping over buckling floors and dodging falling walls to make it to his locker so he could retrieve his spare shirt.

Yes.

Normalcy bias can be a real killer.

It's far better than panic.

If you have to exit a plane in a emergency, grab your bags and leave like normal, or panic and start screaming we are all going to die and start shoving.

Of course everyone who reads about it responded exactly right in their heads.

I just wanted to point out that you are not meant to grab your bags for an emergency exit of a plane.

Of course raving panic is bad.

What you are describing is not the result of normalcy bias, it is an actual adaptive response.

Normalcy bias is receiving information of a very serious threat and still holding an unfounded disbelief in the consequences of, or optimism about the results, and so NOT taking adaptive action.

Normalcy bias is what makes people keep on eating dinner while a fire is visible at the side of the conference room or dance floor. Or, in your case, just not feeling the need to leave the plane quickly...

I suppose that given a choice of everyone else having normalcy bias or panic, I'd choose normalcy bias, as that way a raving crowd won't get in my way as I rapidly head for the exit, but beyond that selfish motive, I'd rather have more people respond adaptively and not die.

(& um, don't grab your bags as you head for the exit windows and slides — that's a sort of different normalcy bias, as if you are leaving the plane normally.)

> <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 6.0">

This was circa 2003 [1] - but the website feels like its from 1995 anwyay...

[1] http://www.softpanorama.org/Office/Frontpage/history.shtml

Oh my a shtml file in the wild. That's like spotting bigfoot or a payphone

Another article about that incident can be found here: https://magazine.ieee-pes.org/novemberdecember-2012/history-...

Also another interesting thing is how on the Canadian side there are three more power stations in the immediate vicinity of the falls, all of which are now out of use. There are some interesting urban exploring reports found on the net (or at least there used to be a few years ago), a good starting point which is definitively still online might be http://www.vanishingpoint.ca/niagara-hydro, plus one other link I had saved is https://web.archive.org/web/20120106063546/http://sleepycity...

The "standard" power line frequency back in the early days of hydroelectricity generation at Niagara Falls was 25 cycles per second (Hz). I had an electronics teacher who used to tell us how the power companies of Upstate New York and Southern Ontario made the transition to 60Hz very abruptly, with crews going door-to-door exchanging any appliance or equipment wired for 25Hz for an equivalent, brand new 60Hz model. Bear in mind that this predated almost all electronic devices. 25Hz generation carried on at several Niagara sites well into the late 20th century, although by then any 25Hz generator would have been paired with a frequency shifter as needed, which was simply a 25Hz motor geared to a 60Hz generator. Yes, there were energy losses inherent in such a system, but all the engineers had to do was point at Niagara Falls and say "No worries, there's plenty of energy here."

I grew up in Western New York (granted, decades after this happened) but never heard about it until it popped up on here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccu1oooOmdU

nit: John Haney is from Longmont, CO, not Longmount, CO.

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