Word: preventable
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...control room itself that the utility realized the source and extent of the problem - but by that time the failure was out of control. As power lines shut off, electricity was channeled through an increasingly narrow part of the grid - until those lines automatically tripped off as well, to prevent damage from the unsafe levels of electrical current. The final result was midnight darkness in New York City's Times Square. "It required a number of things to go wrong on the same day," says Jeffrey Daigle, chief electrical engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. "Any one of those...
Daigle is a member of the U.S.-Canada Power Outage Task Force, which investigated the causes behind the blackout, and worked on ways to prevent another one - but that may not be possible. He calls the blackout a "once in 10 years event," and past blackouts in 1996, 1977 and 1965 bear that out. (After the 2003 event, Daigle notes, some utility operators in western Europe said that such a widespread blackout could never occur with the continent's better designed grid - but in fact a major failure hit their system just a couple months later.) "[Failure] is always possible...
...Russia's outlook on the events in Georgia will be shaped by its refusal to fully accept Georgia's independence. Russia has long sought to re-establish influence in Georgia and prevent it from joining NATO (a move Russia sees as part of a hostile encirclement by the West), and also to prevent the oil pumped to Turkey from Azerbaijan and elsewhere in Central Asia from bypassing Russian control. Georgia claims that Russian planes have in recent days bombed the strategically important oil pipeline that transits Georgia. The pipeline actually had been inoperative since Aug. 6 as a result...
...Currier said that the Medpedia Project will not take any funds from the biomedical industry in order to prevent conflicts of interest that could arise if it were to take funds from pharmaceutical companies, for example...
...Chinese sources acknowledge that Bush has more urgent business. Bush will meet with both Hu Jintao, his Chinese counterpart, and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin - both veto wielding members of the U.N. Security Council. With world capitals now awash in rumors about what Israel might do militarily to prevent the government in Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, Bush will press China and Russia for stiffer economic sanctions against Tehran, which is resolutely refusing to suspend its uranium enrichment program. Tehran let another informal deadline pass last weekend, and reiterated it had no intention of stopping its enrichment, which...