Dancing starling spectacle caused power cuts in Scottish village (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Dancing starling spectacle caused power cuts in Scottish village (2020)

bbc.com

42 pointslobbly21 comments

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> He said the firm would work with RSPB Scotland to find ways to discourage the birds from the power lines.

Or just maybe install some plastic spacing rods in the effected stretch to prevent the wires clashing.

> Install some plastic spacing rods in the effected stretch...

No! Nature is the enemy! We can't let birds around the cables. They're fake anyway! /s.

How would these work?

Worth pointing out the irony in terms of self-organized criticality [0], which describes the activity of starlings flocking together in terms of dynamical systems and is also used in self-organized criticality control [1] which has been applied to power grids to prevent power outages (from cascades of load shedding).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality_con...

I absolutely adore starlings. I used to work across from a wild meadow. In the fall starlings would gorge on some kind of berries from the meadow and then sit on the power lines on my side of the street. The result: a several hundred meter long line of pink bird poop on the sidewalk.

What always amazed me is how their takeoffs and landings seem synchronized. One second they're sitting on the power line chattering at each other - creating a great racket - and then suddenly everything goes quiet and they all take off together.

I hate starlings.

I am in the US. Some prick decided to bring about 100 of them to Central Park NYC in 1890 because he liked Shakespeare, and Shakespeare mentioned them a few times in his plays.

They are an invasive species in the US, and that’s a problem. They are also horrifically screechy, which is where my hatred comes from. I’ve heard them sing some quite pleasant songs now and then—is this what they do more in their natural habitat? In my city, they mostly scream aggressively all day.

I have never hunted animals, but if I knew how to legally kill starlings in my city, I would start tomorrow.

Well, there seems to be no trees there, so the starlings are sitting on the power lines because no choice.

There aren't any trees in that particular field, but Airth isn't exactly in a barren treeless wasteland - there are pockets of woodland around the village: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Airth,+Falkirk,+UK/@56.067...

Right, fair enough, but if there were trees regularly everywhere, there would be no huge tree-less (but powerline-ful) area, and between a weird chair-powerline and a nice chair-tree, I guess the choice is easy for a bird.

I mean, if there were _neither_ any power lines, the starlings would certainly sit a bit further, but there _are_ powerlines (i.e. chairs), so here they are.

(did you notice, I'm trying to think bird)

I did! Good job. But for me the weird thing is that it’s a pretty typical landscape outside the cities in the Scottish central belt so it’s weird this has just happened here

Why is there a powercut? Because there was a tweet-storm.

What makes me slightly angry is the supplier saying they don't know what is causing it when all they had to do was go there and look!

That is my biggest gripe with corporates and bureaucracies, they talk a lot when a simple bit of action would nip something in the bud! We have become feaful people who would rather write an email than call somebody or go and see them in-person.

Go where? Chances are there’s quite a few km of power lines in sometimes badly reachable places to inspect.

Also, given that the interruptions were intermittent, it wouldn’t just be a matter of checking the power lines once.

I also don’t rule out they have fairly good stats on causes of intermittent short power interruptions, and looked at more likely causes first.

I don’t think there is enough info in this article to put blame this way.

It's true it might be inaccessible and that they have telemetry. But if the issue is recurring and you find no solution in the data you gotta walk the line. In fact this time it was the solution but ill grant you its an unlikely event. So you are both right? In medicine you always ALWAYS perform visual inspection of the site no matter how sure you are.

I live in rural Scotland and we had a mild problem with our electricity supply - our lights were flickering slightly, nobody else noticed but it was really annoying me.

I contacted the electricity supplier and they had a team come out within 24 hours - which rather surprised me. Turns out there was arcing at a junction box in the supply outside of our property which they fixed pretty quickly - presumably they react to things like that promptly due to potential fire risks.

Most utilities are very responsive to customer complaints in my experience. It's often the only signal they have of something being wrong short of a fuse breaking and completely dropping the power. If you don't have smart meters giving real time data there's no way to know about this.

We've had two attempts to have a smart meter installed - each time they come round, check the mobile phone signal strength and go away again....

Utilities do expect their equipment in the field every several years, including physical measurements of things like poles. As well as checking power lines for foliage interfering with the conductors. They will also go out and check things in response to complaints. But this is a hard one. If you go out and there's no birds, you haven't learned anything. You're probably going to suspect it's something weird with the transformers or something.

This article says “There's been several unexplained outages around dusk in recent weeks”.

If that’s Althea had, I think a few weeks is a decent time frame for debugging this. Chances are there were days in which nothing happened, and it can’t have been evident soon that the “around dusk” part was significant.

If a short happens on the line in theory if they can measure the amount current they can figure out the resistance and how far down the line to go.

Most distribution setups are in series. If a line faults, it's gonna travel upstream, kill the fuse, and then drop power for everyone downstream. There's nothing on those lines measuring power aside from the meters at the end customers.

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