Veolia Transport: where were the backup plans?

lprent
12 years ago
Categories: public transport
Tags: failures, veolia transport

I have and still do deal with quite a lot with systems in my day-job. But this…. I’m aghast at the self-evident stupidity.

A power outage has shut down almost all train services across the Auckland region.

The fault at KiwiRail’s National Train Control in Wellington, which controls Auckland signals and radio control, occurred about 4pm, and it is not know how long train services will be affected.

Apart from the poor quality of journalism, this really raises more questions than it answers.

This report tends to indicate that a single point of failure in Wellington is capable of taking out a major part of the transport system in a city more than 700km away.

Now speaking purely from my old training in earth sciences, there is absolutely no way that ANY system in NZ should rely on a single location as a point of failure. The risk of earthquakes at any one location anywhere in NZ is pretty high as Christchurch showed. But Wellington / Nelson has probably the highest probability of having a major earthquake of any location in the country.

Then there are those hundreds of kilometres between there and here in Auckland. Sure the comms, power lines, and roads in NZ go either side of the volcanic plateau (at least I hope they still do). But it isn’t hard for anyone who has looked at the past history of the Taupo, Rotorua, and even those smaller cones scattered around the region, to easily imagine conditions that would cut links from one side of the north island to the other.

There should be at least ones warm backup system in the north. What country do they think they are in? Frigging Britain? This is New Zealand where you have to build a lot of redundancy into every system. Hell I run this site with several backup systems at varying degrees of warmth.

But FFS. Even if they were stupid enough to just rely on a single geographical point of failure. Then where in the hell were their backup generators?

Perhaps the journo’s should examine why a single point of failure in Wellington should take out an essential service for tens of thousands of people in Auckland.