YOW TCU in the dark!

[Guest Say Again]

So there I was, on a break, reading this very forum at around 4:07 yesterday afternoon when all of a sudden, the lights in the offices go off. In the ops-room I can hear the UPS (uninteruptible power supply) alarm, which is normal and which means we're on battery power until the diesel kicks in. My buddy and I walk back to see what's going on, of course, and really make nothing if it since, usually, the power comes back on and life returns to normal... not so yesterday.

After some checking of the warning lights, we were forced to realize that the diesel wasn't starting. So that meant that we had around 45 minutes to an hour of juice before all the lights went out. We started changing the rate of airplanes coming in and issued a ground stop to those that were still on the ground about to leave for our place.

35 minutes into this, the diesel still isn't going. At this point, we're dialing up the apropriate freqs on the portables and cancel all departures out of Ottawa. The techs are still trying to make the darn diesel work.

After accepting a few arrivals returning from YYZ and seeing one head for YTR, things quiet down. Nobody wants to fly anymore, except the VFRs for whom it's still a beautiful day. An hour and a bit has elapsed and we're still on batteries.

After an hour and 50 minutes, we're starting to really come to terms with the fact that we're going to lose all power and a light we hadn't seen before on the UPS panel comes on: SHUT DOWN IMMINENT

What an weird feeling. We just looked at each other for a second and scrambled to advise all surrouding sectors that we were signing off and were only going to monitor some frequencies.... then the beeping stopped... and everything went off.

One of the guys lit one of the flashlights we'd found in the previous hour and there we sat, in the dark (save for the flashlight) with no other noise than our talking to each other.

Three hours or so after the power went out, the diesel finally got going. As it turns out, there was a problem with the switch from the gen to the power system was malfunctionning and the actual engine would shut down when it couldn't transfer the power. It took an hour or so to get the radio system back on line and yet another hour for the radar to be back on the back-up screens.

And that's the melodramatic rendition of my evening. How did yours go?

FX

[Guest q650]

Great backup system NavCan has. Imagine if the power failure took place at the supermega YUL TCU (after closing YOW)? What kind of problems would that have created?