U.S. power industry may ask key employees to live at work if coronavirus worsens | Hacker News Reader

U.S. power industry may ask key employees to live at work if coronavirus worsens

reuters.com

186 pointsericdanielski56 comments

Weird. This is normal. I work for a large electric utility in the United States and we already have employees sequestered. This is pretty much par for the course.

So how does this work - do they sequester a large number of employees? Enough shifts for people to get a decent amount of time off? Do they sequester people on site, or just book out an entire local hotel? Are the living quarters and food appealing? Is there good bonus pay?

They're working in two-week shifts. Pack your bags and move in for two weeks. They need to keep them sequestered with no contact with the outside world so they don't get infected. Then they'll be replaced by another crew that comes in for two weeks. Each of the members of that crew will be spot-checked for infection (utilities maintaining national critical infrastructure don't have special access to coronavirus testing kits like the NBA apparently does). When offsite you're to maintain physical quarantine in your home.

The facilities where they sequester typically have a small gym, showers and a kitchen. Food is provided. Think of it more like a fire station. The quarantining part is new, but the sequestering part isn't. Utilities do this when facing extremely large storms and other such events. This is how we do business continuity planning to ensure the lights stay on even in the midst of a storm, natural disaster, or pandemic. Those that sign on know it's part of the job and they're compensated for it - though I can't speak to how well they're being compensated.

I never knew this before and this is fascinating. Gives me a huge sense of appreciation for these people. Would love to learn more about the life of a utility worker in a disaster situation.

I'm an IT guy but what's interesting is how they handle events known in the industry as mutual assist. You all have seen this in the news: a huge storm does severe damage to the local utility infrastructure and crews from other utilities, oftentimes from other states, come to assist (sometimes they stay for weeks on end). The logistics of feeding and housing these folks is one logistical nightmare that I don't know much about, I'm involved with their getting their work orders from our work management system. Imagine you just hired several hundred or several thousand contractors all at once and suddenly they all need access to some of your internal systems. The other interesting challenge we have is keeping our distribution models up-to-date. You'd think we'd know exactly what circuit you were on and what phase(s) were serving you. Generally we do but the information isn't 100% correct. When you have big outages and are doing mutual assist the guys' primary concern is getting the lights back on. Maybe they put you on a different circuit. Maybe they switched which phase of the transformer you connect to. Who know? In normal circumstances these kinds of changes are back-propagated to our distribution modelling system. But during big outages with mutual assist? No. The emphasis is on restoring power.

Now I'm on a team trying to alert you when we believe your power is out. This is where these discrepancies in the distribution model come back to haunt you. If you inform someone you believe their power is out and it's not then they're usually pretty cool about it. It's when you've informed someone you believe you've restored their power and they're sitting there in the dark that they get pretty upset.

Anyway, now you have a little more insight into the problems we face and some of the work we do. We don't use the sexiest technology stack in the world, but it's more than made up for by being able to see the importance of the work I do. Electricity is the foundation of modern civilization and I'm a part of it - cool!

I have a good friend that works as a contracted lineman on traveling crews.

Usually, they are given a hotel or motel room, and a per-diem for food in cash or a Visa giftcard.

For food, it is usually buying whatever at the local Walmart and heating it up in the hotelroom microwave.

It is mostly brute-force and there is alot of money paid out, but you work alot of hours.

It is not uncommon for my friend to work a 70 to 80 hour week.

> When offsite you're to maintain physical quarantine in your home.

I have SRE friends who are trying to do this, but sometimes their teenage kids or boomer parents are sneaking out against orders.

Here’s hoping the US gets its testing act together real quick; I don’t think most people are very good at home quarantine.

what's the pay rate for sequestered employees?

Wow! You’d have to pay me Netflix money to do that job!

This is pretty much par for what course?

I understand doing it for covid-19, but is it par for the course for "flu season"? otherwise, how have you established these practices? You can't be doing it all the time if you're having employees quarantine when they're not working, as you mentioned.

any sort of emergency, oil refineries here have been doing it for at least a week or two

Think major storms - especially hurricanes and big ice storms. You need people responsible for generation, transmission and distribution in place and sequestered to ensure power is still available to those areas whose distribution circuits haven't been impacted. For the big storms they start moving crews in place, just outside the places likely to suffer the most impacts, before the storm hits so they're ready to go as soon as possible. As far as we're concerned this is just a variation of our storm mode as we call it. We got this.

I understand emergency response by responders who are trained, but in this case there isn't a power emergency, the emergency is to protect the people who work the shifts in the power plant from getting each other sick in a pandemic, and off duty too.

I'm not saying that there is any incompetence or shortage of can-do, just seems like something that there may not have been much practicing for. I mean, the way you usually go into high gear might be optimum for spreading the virus, for example.

My girlfriend's mother works at Rockefeller in NYC and they told all essential employees to be ready to move on campus, indefinitely .

Update: typo

> and they told all non-essential employees to be ready to move on campus, indefinitely .

Do you mean all essential employees?

sorry, type yes essential employees.

Could you clarify what institution you mean by "Rockefeller"?

I did a Wikipedia search and it looks like there are several options in New York.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_University

this link is correct.

I assume, Rockefeller University. It's a large hospital on the upper East side.

Not quite. It's a graduate school and research institute next to Cornell Medical School. It has a tiny research hospital (ten beds or so).

Source: I went there for grad school.

she works in a lab.

This isn't as big a deal at Rockefeller as it might seem, as they already have attached apartment buildings that most of the graduate students and much of the faculty live in.

Not surprising, and I'm glad it's being done. I'd be more worried if the headline was something like "Power companies wait too late to sequester plant operation crews, personnel shortages mount as employees catch COVID-19" or similiar.

I got a taste of something similar to this years back when I was a NOC monkey. I worked a weekend shift. One time, the news reported that big snow storm was coming that weekend. When I showed up that Friday, the site manager gave me the info for the hotel they were putting me up in for the weekend. Yes, he knows I have a relatively short drive to work along routes that will be the first ones hit by the plows and salt trucks. Yes, he's glad I have a fresh battery and snow tires on my car. No, none of that matters, we need to guarantee personnel on site, and the hotel's closer.

Companies that provide important services usually have plans in place for events like this if they have their shit together.

Usually.

They probably have an underwriter who won't pay out if any of those t's are not crossed.

I sure wish people who are being asked to go above and beyond during this crisis would be compensated above and beyond for it. The idea of people putting themselves in danger for the rest of us for a shitty wage is so depressing.

(I'm thinking healthcare workers, grocery clerks, etc. Not that the power folks are necessarily putting themselves in danger)

I've heard rumours about a high-frequency trading shop doing that, too

Weird. Can't they work from home?

Most home offices don't have 16 displays attached to the desk

mine would if I made that kind of money.

I'm waiting for someone to bring the vertically curved video slot machine displays to market for general use. Those would make a nice personal command center.

16 displays so you can save the time it would take you to switch desktops and physically move your chair around to look at different windows instead? I bet it looks really fancy and cool.

I was mostly kidding, though they do tend to have what amounts to a videowall attached to the trading desks from what I've seen in photos shared by friends working in HFT.

What I suspect is a larger barrier is their paranoia. It'd surprise me if any HFT firm was comfortable with equipping the homes of its traders with everything needed from the bespoke software to appropriate hardware etc. They're very protective of their trade secrets and wouldn't want that stuff sitting around in the homes of employees where it can be either copied or otherwise scrutinized.

I have an acquaintance who’s a trader and the company had installed a 16-display rig in their house last week (London).

That's more for someone doing the trading than someone designing the trading robot (HFT).

There might be latency issues. Although I'd expect that any decisions which are being made which require such latency are automated decisions running on a on-prem machine anyway...

Need folks on-site to manage the on-premises machines in case of outage.

My firm (options market making, not exactly HFT, but close) has most people working from home successfully, but some are having problems with flaky internet. If I was the owner of a big shop I would probably want at least a skeleton crew in the office. A regional Comcast outage could easily take 90% of the remote employees offline.

The same risk would seem to apply to most Silicon Valley oncall rotations every night.

Weird to single out HFT's. Isn't everyone working from home right now?

Especially since, in times of market turmoil, HFT's are an important market participant. Someone needs to catch the knives.

Also they're probably having their most profitable periods since 2008, so I'd imagine there's a lot of incentive (for employees and owners) to keep trading whenever possible.

> Weird to single out HFT's. Isn't everyone working from home right now?

“That” in parent comment is being sequestered at work, so the opposite of working from home.

That seems wrong to me, I would hardly consider HFT to be a critical infrastructure. They should be sending most of those employees home.

Well, can all agree that HFTs think very highly of themselves, and thus self-identifying as critical is unsurprising if dubious?

HFT should be banned and there should be a 15 minute delay before trade execution.

And that delay should be randomized.

That's a beautiful solution, hadn't considered that. You would instantly take almost all the wind out of their sails, with a simple random delay.

What kind of housing to they have? The article mentions bedding, blankets, etc, but not what sort of living quarters are provided. I hope they don't have people sleeping under their desks. Putting trailers in the parking lots seems like a good idea, to keep morale up if nothing else.

Yeah there is also a hygienic threat to the workers. The 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed more people than WW1, found breeding grounds in the dense cantonments built for soldiers.

https://youtu.be/fLGNrC9k418?t=2494

I am curious what the strategy is for linemen, particularly if a natural disaster occurs (inclement weather), in conjuction with the ongoing ‘war’.

Probably just send them out, no? Do they even end up particularly close to other people even in normal times? People tend to avoid power lines that are being actively worked on.

Yes, they work in crews and travel to different states. They have to eat, and stay in hotels for days or weeks.

Oh, interesting, I would have thought at least every few counties would have their own crew. Huh.

If you work with a fixed crew and equipment, you'll have whole teams down at once, but other teams won't have been exposed at all.

Except they interact with hotel staff and Walmart and grocery store cashiers.

Also, part of my friend’s job is transporting equipment to various teams.

Url changed from https://energycentral.com/c/ec/covid-19-news-nuclear-workers..., which points to this.

What a wonderful time to attack the US power grid and cause mass mayhem. Would certainly destabilize the world's leading superpower.

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