A clear example of The Guardian lying about the Venezuelan blackout?

[Ghost Dog]

Last edited Fri Mar 15, 2019, 07:36 AM - Edit history (2)

A Guardian report today Friday March 15th, byline Joe Parkin Daniels in Caracas (link below) appears to falsely assert that a report from the Central University of Venezuela’s faculty of engineering confirms that the blackout was caused by a bush fire, and supports this assertion by linking to an earlier Guardian article published on Wednesday March 13th, byline Sam Jones (no location provided) which informs us that "According to Rodrigo Linares, a mechanical engineer and writer for the Caracas Chronicles website, the fault occurred on one of the main power lines between the San Gerónimo B and Malena substations." A link is provided to an article by this Roberto Linares published at the Caracas Chronicles website on March 10th.

The article by Roberto Linares, who decribes himself as "Many interests, little time. Mechanical Engineer, first from USB, later from MIT. Making a living as a machine designer.", informs us that "From people inside the electric industry, we know that an overheat alarm was triggered between the San Geronimo B and Malena substations, which are like nodes... The engineers suspect that the overheat alarm was triggered by a forest fire." In support of this speculation (no evidence is provided of the existence of such a bush or forest fire), Roberto Linares notes that "It is mandatory to keep vegetation trimmed under and around power lines, to avoid the risk of this kind of events. Anyone that has driven by the countryside and under these large power lines would see there’s a corridor under the lines. These corridors haven’t been maintained in years and there is a very hot summer going on. In a tropical country, this means the bushes can cover a line very fast."

Whatever reason The Guardian's Joe Parkin Daniels in Caracas might have for alleging the existence of a report from the Central University of Venezuela’s faculty of engineering (which is nowhere mentioned in the sources provided) allegedly confirming that the blackout was caused by a bush fire, he provides no evidence, beyond speculation written by a blogger.


I followed these links:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/14/venezuela-blackout-power-returns -> Joe Parkin Daniels in Caracas Thu 14 Mar 2019 21.51 GMT Last modified on Thu 14 Mar 2019 21.53 GMT
A new report from the Central University of Venezuela’s faculty of engineering confirmed that the blackout was caused when a bush fire near the Malena substation in eastern Venezuela took out a vital section of the country’s power grid. ->

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/13/venezuela-blackout-what-caused-it-and-what-happens-next -> According to Rodrigo Linares, a mechanical engineer and writer for the Caracas Chronicles website, the fault occurred on one of the main power lines between the San Gerónimo B and Malena substations. When that 765-kilovolt line went down, two others suffered an overload and also failed. ->

https://www.caracaschronicles.com/2019/03/10/nationwide-blackout-in-venezuela-faq/ -> From people inside the electric industry, we know that an overheat alarm was triggered between the San Geronimo B and Malena substations, which are like nodes. San Geronimo B is just South of Valle de La Pascua (Guarico state, central plains); Malena is a bit in the middle of nowhere, between Bolivar’s Trocal 19 and the Orinoco River. From San Geronimo B substation, comes the electric load to power all the TVs, light bulbs, blenders, etc. At Malena substation end the cables that come directly from the turning water wheels of the Guri dam. If you follow the lines from Guri, the country’s main dam South of Ciudad Guayana, they go North from Guri to Malena and San Geronimo, and from there it splits into several lines going to the central region and then to the rest of the country (East and West).

This particular corridor carries three 765 kV (kilovolts) power lines, which are the largest and most important lines of the country. One of these lines, apparently the one between San Geronimo B and Malena, went out and overloaded the other two, so all three died. When all of a sudden the lines went off and power wasn’t getting through, not only all those TVs, blenders and lights went off: the water wheels started to spin out of control (in the industry we call this scenario a “load rejection”). Protections systems kicked in and the turbines shut themselves off, hopefully with no damage...

... The engineers suspect that the overheat alarm was triggered by a forest fire. It is mandatory to keep vegetation trimmed under and around power lines, to avoid the risk of this kind of events. Anyone that has driven by the countryside and under these large power lines would see there’s a corridor under the lines. These corridors haven’t been maintained in years and there is a very hot summer going on. In a tropical country, this means the bushes can cover a line very fast...

... Rodrigo Linares: Many interests, little time. Mechanical Engineer, first from USB, later from MIT. Making a living as a machine designer.

Latin America: https://www.democraticunderground.com/110866290


Edit: ... At the time of this writing I see no sign of any similar story at the AP, AFP, nor Reuters agencies.
AFP's latest on Venezuela tells us that:

Experts said an attack by a foreign state actor on Venezuela's grid was possible, but unlikely.

"Knowing Venezuela, it was likely an internal failure," Jeff Middleton, the chief technology officer at The Vault Foundation, a company that secures crypto currency transactions, told AFP.

Venezuela's infrastructure has degraded over years because of lack of investment, a significant brain drain, and the government's practice of putting the military in charge of key civilian facilities and companies. That has impacted not only the electricity grid but also the country's vital oil industry. The situation has worsened with successive rounds of US sanctions against Maduro's government, including steps that have severely curbed its oil exports.

- China, Spain offer help -

While Reuters has:

Military intervention not an answer for Venezuela - Colombia president tells paper

and:

Bolivia's Morales says Venezuela needs dialogue, not foreign meddling

[Ghost Dog]

1. Regarding such "overheat alarms",

the Scientific American provided this information in August 2017:

August 14, 2003, was a typical warm day in the Midwest. But shortly after 2:00 P.M. several power lines in northern Ohio, sagging under the high current they were carrying, brushed against some overgrown trees and shut down. Such a disturbance usually sets off alarms in a local utility’s control room, where human operators work with controllers in neighboring regions to reroute power flows around the injury site.

On this day, however, the alarm software failed, leaving local operators unaware of the problem. Other controllers who were relaying, or “wheeling,” large amounts of power hundreds of miles across Ohio, Michigan, the northeastern U.S. and Ontario, Canada, were oblivious, too. Transmission lines surrounding the failure spot, already fully taxed, were forced to shoulder more than their safe quota of electricity.

To make matters worse, utilities were not generating enough “reactive power”—an attribute of the magnetic and electric fields that move current along a wire. Without sufficient reactive power to support the suddenly shifting flows, overburdened lines in Ohio cut out by 4:05 P.M. In response, a power plant shut down, destabilizing the system’s equilibrium. More lines and more plants dropped out. The cascade continued, faster than operators could track with the decades-old monitoring equipment that dots most of the North American power grid, and certainly much faster than they could control. Within eight minutes 50 million people across eight states and two Canadian provinces had been blacked out. The event was the largest power loss in North American history...

[friendly_iconoclast]

2. A clear example of clumsy insinuation against The Guardian, perhaps?

Sometimes poor journalism is just that, and not a MI6 plot-unless other evidence emerges, of course...

[Ghost Dog]

3. Indeed. But, why speculate about a bush fire when just one cable touching bush

would apparently be enough to cause a sensor to signal an alarm which would, normally, trigger a circuit-breaker?

And then present that speculation as confirmed fact, confirmed by a link to sources which do no such thing?

Google doesn't appear to have such a report indexed in English nor in Spanish. But then, the cited university's website appears to be offline.

I don't know. MI6 sounds a bit James Bondish, don't you think? SIS and sisters are a team these days, aren't they? One for all and all for one. On the other hand, to get a staff position in the MSM these days, in exotic locations, the competition must be something fierce, so, as long as your editor doesn't care as long as the advertisers are happy, the expenses get paid and the salary's coming in, why not stretch a fact or five?. In the 'right' direction, of course.

[friendly_iconoclast]

4. Perhaps it *is* Segrettian ratfucking-if so, who is actually doing it?

Every intelligence agency pulls 'false flag' ops, eventually.

Given the amount of actual evidence produced so far, I could just as convincingly claim that the pixel-stained wretch
Daniels was actually played by the FSB or the Chinese in order to make Western Media look bad...

Of course, if someone got some actual dirt on Daniels and/or Linares, I'll happily delete the snark and issue
a mea culpa.

[Ghost Dog]

5. So no sweat. Business as usual. There's a lot of chaff in the fundament

and we're not even supposed to want to know, you know, anything, are we.

Cough.