Blue Crab Boulevard

Something - and nobody knows what at this point - appears to have caused a major disturbance on the power grid in Florida. As a result (or maybe the initiating event, nobody knows yet), two nuclear power plants tripped off line while two coal units that share the same sire also tripped. Power was out over wide areas of Florida, although it is starting to be restored at this hour.

MIAMI - A South Florida nuclear plant automatically shut down Tuesday, causing sporadic power outages throughout the state that affected up to 3 million people from Daytona Beach through the Florida Keys.

Authorities did not specify the cause of the midday shutdown of both reactors at Florida Power & Light's Turkey Point plant south of Miami but say there were no safety concerns.

Power was already restored in some places by early afternoon and was estimated to be fully restored by 6 p.m., Florida Power & Light said.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the two reactors automatically shut down. Two other power plants farther north, the Crystal River reactor and St. Lucie twin reactors, continued to operate, although officials at those two facilities noticed the grid disturbance.

Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Alvarez said the outages were technical, not criminal.

"It's a matter of just a cascading effect," he said.

The outages have no connection to terrorism, Homeland Security Department spokeswoman Laura Keehner said.

"We don't know whether the grid disturbance caused the units to shut down or that their shut down caused the grid disturbance," said Kenneth Clark, a spokesman at the NRC regional office in Atlanta. He said the two reactors were automatically shut down.

"There are no safety concerns. The reactors shut down as designed," Clark said. Both reactors continued to have offsite electric power, and two coal-burning power plants at Turkey Point also shut down, he said.

It does not take a lot for the grid to collapse - having four big units all go off at once or close together - is a very big blow to the system. I'm surprised they have been able to get most of the area back up this quickly. There will be a lot of people trying to analyze the sequence of events to figure out what happened.

UPDATE: Florida Power and Light says that and equipment malfunction and fire at a substation caused two transmission lines to trip off. It sounds as if several other things that should have operated to mitigate the sudden loss of the lines also may have failed. As a result, the Turkey Point units suddenly had nowhere to send their electricity. The plant's safety systems tripped the units off line to avoid damage. This appears to be tied to some protective relaying problems (that's an educated guess). The system appears to have not responded as the operators expected.

Protective relaying is more of an art than a science (the bible of the industry is still, I believe, The Art and Science of Protective Relaying .) I worked a brief stint in a protective relaying group years back in a familiarization tour. It's very interesting stuff. 

UPDATE: CNN confirms:

Utility workers were still trying to piece together what happened, but he said the "initiating event" was the failure of the disconnect switch.

"These systems are all designed so that you can handle two contingencies," Olivera said. "If you had a switch that failed, protective devices would have isolated the problem. That did not occur today. That's the part we don't have an answer for."

Relaying failure. One fact I may have taken the wrong approach on in the last update, though:

"In a fraction of a second, the demand was far greater than the power plants that were on line generating electricity could handle," he said. "When you have that kind of imbalance, we have a system that kicks in and it starts turning people's lights off, essentially balancing the demand with what's available."

I assumed the plants had nowhere to send power - it may have been that they were asked to meet a demand they could not. Regardless, it is a load mismatch that caused the unit trips and the blackouts. That traces back to a system not responding as expected. That, in turn, points to a relaying problem. And a lot of people are going to lose some stomach lining trying to nail down what happened today.

Well, this post from Above the Law should get people's attention.

BigLaw lawyers love Obama. If one searches by law firm various databases on-line for campaign contributions, one sees an overwhelming sea of blue, and most of it to Obama.

But how will Obama affect BigLaw wallets? On Above the Law, we regularly see commenters threaten to abandon law firms for falling $5,000/year short of market. I therefore thought it worthwhile to examine the effects of Obama’s tax and spending plans on take-home pay.

We all know that Obama wants to end the Bush tax cuts. That is a 3% bump across the board to the bad old days when associates faced a marginal federal tax rate of 36%.

But the real hidden tax is that Obama plans to end the social-security tax cap. Right now, you may notice, sometime during the summer or early fall, your take-home pay suddenly goes up because they stop deducting FICA. Current law caps social security taxes: in 2008, the cap is at $102,000. Obama proposes to abolish this. That mid-summer bump will be no more: add about several thousand dollars to your annual tax bill.

But social-security taxes are not only on employees. The government also charges 6.2% to employers that you never see on your W-2s. But rest assured the partners see this, and will notice that the expense of keeping an associate has risen several thousand dollars a year when FICA taxes double and triple. Will they swallow that additional expense, or take it out of your bonus?

They do a spreadsheet and look at a "typical" law firm associate. The result is grim.

The effect is enormous. Betsy’s marginal tax rate goes up from an already ridiculous 42.5% to 51.4%—not including the new 6.2% marginal tax on your employer. Subject to how she structures her withholding, Betsy’s take home pay drops an average of $515 a paycheck—less in the early months of the year, but much more in the later months of the year. Add in the effects on her bonus, and Betsy loses nearly $20,000/year in take-home pay.

I added a third column: how big a pay cut would you have to take to receive the same take-home income? The answer is that Obama’s tax increases have a bigger effect on your income than a law firm cutting New York salaries by $34,000. 

The calculations apply to anyone making that much. The impact of that one, concrete proposal that Obama has offered for raising revenue for his ambitious spending plans will have a disastrous impact on a lot of people. Do read the comments. Readers over there are saying they plan to switch to McCain. There is much amusement to be had over there.

Better yet, this is only the beginning of the tax increases Obama will have to get passed to pay for the insane spending levels he is promising. Things are looking up for McCain already.

I simply must email this link to my sister, the attorney. She'll pitch a fit, I can assure you.  

It's a bit funny to read a serious article that starts out with an anecdote from an episode of The Simpsons. Yet that is exactly how this LiveScience article on disastrous disaster relief starts out.

In an early episode of "The Simpsons," when Homer has a heart attack and dies, his boss Mr. Burns offers a perfunctory gesture and instructs his assistant to send Homer's wife a ham. (Homer returns to life once his soul hears about the ham.)

The humanitarian aid industry might not be so different in its mechanical reaction to complex and diverse emergencies that arise around the globe, according to researchers from Harvard School of Public Health.

If not ham (which was apparently sent in cans to the Muslim populations of Iraq and Afghanistan), then it is the donation of inappropriate clothes or services based on misconceptions of what is needed when disaster strikes. Ultimately this can do more harm than good.

While television news images of happy and feeble volunteers unable to strike a nail with a hammer in the Katrina cleanup might make this crystal clear, only recently has the altruistic but often inefficient efforts of humanitarian aid groups been studied scientifically.

Michael VanRooyen, co-director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, summarizes the issues involved in disaster relief in a new lecture at Harvard called "Humanitarian Myths: Twelve Myths and Misconceptions in Disaster Response," as well as in articles last year in the journal Prehospital and Disaster Medicine. 

There are a host of things that can - and have - gone wrong with disaster relief efforts.

Food can rot; medicine can be administered haphazardly; medical equipment often can't be used for lack of electricity or proper storage; and clothes are often inappropriate for the culture or climate, ultimately resold, undermining the local economy, VanRooyen and his colleagues have found. VanRooyen said that surplus materials can reduce the demand for local products, which closes factories and places people out of work.

Complicating matters is the proliferation of humanitarian aid groups, which function with little professional oversight or coordination with local governments and disaster relief experts. Everyone wants to be first, and everyone wants to be a hero. Such bravado and chaos has led to deaths, such as in Zaire in the mid-1990s when cholera hit poorly operated refugee camps. 

The intent of the study is not to discourage efforts, but to urge volunteers and groups to think about what they are trying to accomplish - and what they are actually capable of. If you're useless with tools, volunteering to help rebuild may not be the best thing you can do.

Cancel the ham. 

The long string of powerful winter storms that have been lashing the Pacific Northwest have done an incredible amount of damage. But they have also uncovered historical treasures and strange things as well.

PORTLAND, Oregon (AP)  — The storms that have lashed Oregon's scenic coast this winter have dredged up an unusual array of secrets: old shipwrecks, historic cannons, ghost forests — even strangely shaped iron deposits.

One of the first ships to emerge from the sands was recently identified as the George L. Olson, which ran aground at Coos Bay's North Jetty on June 23, 1944.

The shipwreck has become a tourist attraction on the southern Oregon coast. Interest became so great that authorities had to reroute traffic around the ship and post signs warning visitors to leave it alone because it is now an archaeological site.

The curiosities began showing up after December when Pacific storms pummeled the state, damaging thousands of homes and causing an estimated $60 million in damage to roads, bridges and public buildings.

Hardest hit was Vernonia, a Coast Range town of about 2,400 people, where floodwaters damaged about 300 homes, ruined schools and temporarily closed businesses.

The storms also brought high seas, which caused beach erosion. Although sands commonly shift in winter, this season appeared especially dramatic. There were reports that up to 17 feet of sand eroded away at Arch Cape.

"It's really an unusual event, the magnitude of it," said Chris Havel of the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department.

Other shipwrecks have emerged recently — a wooden ship near Bandon, also on the southern coast, and another where the Siuslaw River flows into the ocean near Florence. Little is known about either ship, Havel said, and sands have reclaimed the Siuslaw wreck.

Cannons, ghost forests (fields of old stumps) and oddly shaped iron deposits are popping up all over the area. Speaking of things long since buried and forgotten, here's a site I found while poking around looking for something else. It catalogs many abandoned or disused subway stations in New York City. They linked to another site that catalogs Forgotten New York. Lots of unusual stuff on that site.

Hollywood and ABC Television are scrambling to explain how the Oscars telecast managed to shed 21% of its audience since just last year. The dismal figures are the lowest in at least 20 years. Especially devastating was the drop in the crucial 18 to 49 demographic - they lost 25% in that group.

But the worst news for academy officials might have come amid the results for young viewers, the demographic most eagerly sought by TV executives. Sunday's show posted a 10.7 rating in the crucial demographic of adults ages 18 to 49, shedding fully one-quarter of that group compared with last year.

Much of the blame might rest with this year's Oscar contenders, which, as Stewart noted, consisted of exceptionally dark films with limited popular appeal, such as "There Will Be Blood" and the best-picture winner, "No Country for Old Men." Nothing lures viewers like blockbuster nominees. In 1998, the year "Titanic" won best picture, the TV audience numbered 55.2 million.

Schedule disruptions caused by the recent writers strike also might have hurt ABC's efforts to bang promotional drums for the show.

Whatever the cause, academy officials, who've spent years trying to bolster ratings, are now confronting an urgent crisis on how to stem further viewership declines. Not so many years ago, the Oscars were linked with the Super Bowl as the only perennial programs that could attract great masses of viewers. But while this month's Super Bowl on Fox attracted a record-high 97.4 million total viewers, the Oscars are now routinely outrated by Fox's "American Idol." Just last month, the singing contest delivered its season-to-date high of 33.5 million total viewers.

In other words, Hollywood is not making movies people actually want to watch. But they can't figure out why the ratings are tanking? There's clueless, then there's Hollywood. 

Rich Lowry savages Barack Obama's NAFTA-bashing today, pointing out that the ivy-league populist has the facts completely wrong.

For Barack Obama, hope can triumph over anything, except for open trade with a neighboring country with an economy 1/20th the size of ours. Then, all is despair.

Obama’s culprit is Mexico, our third-largest trading partner. It is trade deals like NAFTA — the 1993 accord eliminating tariffs among the U.S., Mexico, and Canada — that “ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with teenagers for minimum wage at Wal-Mart,” Obama intones. Feel inspired yet?

The big picture doesn’t justify this Dickensian evocation of gloom. Since 1993, the U.S. economy has grown by 54 percent. The jobless rate has dropped from 6.9 percent in 1993 to 4.9 percent today. Manufacturing output has increased by 63 percent. Canada and Mexico are our first- and second-largest export markets, and U.S. merchandise exports to them have increased at a slightly faster clip than exports to the rest of the world.

NAFTA has clearly been a (small) benefit to the economy of both the U.S. and Mexico. Critics focus on the large U.S. trade deficit that opened up with Mexico shortly after the adoption of NAFTA, but that had more to do with the decline of the peso and a steep Mexican recession that dampened demand for our exports. Since 2001, our manufactured-goods deficit with NAFTA countries has been stable, making the agreement an implausible villain in the hollowing out of America.

Obama’s complaint, ultimately, is with the long-term liberalization of the Mexican economy. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Mexico joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, lowered its tariff rates, reduced restrictions on foreign investment and deregulated state industries. As a result, both U.S. exports to and imports from Mexico grew rapidly prior to NAFTA.

Because of this dynamic, the Congressional Budget Office estimates almost all of the increased trade between the U.S. and Mexico would have happened without NAFTA. The effect of the agreement itself — rather than the broad trend of liberalization — was marginal. “Relative to the size of the economy,” the CBO writes, “the increases in exports never exceeded 0.12 percent of U.S. GDP, and the increases in imports never exceeded 0.11 percent of U.S. GDP.”

Kind of a silly issue that really isn't what Obama says it is. Expect this one to come back to haunt him in the general election. 

The Nigerian letter email scam was (and still is) bad enough. But the Washington Post reports that an even worse one is circulating. People are receiving emails form someone claiming to be a hitman hired to kill the recipient. However, for a fee, the "hitman" promises not to kill the person.

If only real hit men were so courteous.

In recent months, authorities said, about a dozen Fairfax and Stafford county residents have received e-mails telling them that they are about to be killed. There is a twist: The killer offers a way out.

"The sender tells the receiver, 'I've been hired to kill you, it's one of your friends, I'm watching you. However . . . I don't believe you did what they said, and I'm going to give you a chance to pay me, and I won't kill you,' " Fairfax police spokeswoman Camille Neville said.

The e-mails are extortion for the electronic age, Fairfax and Stafford authorities said — scams to intimidate recipients into divulging personal information.

"What the sender is hoping to 'hit' is an individual's bank account," Bill Kennedy, a Stafford County sheriff's office spokesman, said about the scheme.

The content of the messages varies, including the sum demanded, authorities said. The messages are often rife with spelling and grammar errors, Kennedy said. Authorities said they could detect no connection or pattern among the people who have received the e-mails, many of which were sent to work addresses. 

As always, answering things like this is not a good idea. A good indicator of a scam is that the email solicits banking or personal information. Never, ever send that information in response to an email. 

Hillary Clinton's campaign is over, but that has not penetrated the bizarre world her campaign staff inhabits. This is easily the most unflattering picture of a downright delusional campaign that I have ever read. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank describes a recent meeting between the Clinton campaign and the press corps.

They are in the last throes, if you will.

As Vice President Cheney knows, such predictions can be perilous. Still, there was no mistaking a certain flailing, a lashing-out, as two Clinton advisers sat down for a bacon-and-eggs session yesterday at the St. Regis Hotel.

The Christian Science Monitor had assembled the éminences grises of the Washington press corps — among them David Broder of The Post, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times and columnist Mark Shields — for what turned out to be a fascinating tour of an alternate universe.

First came Harold Ickes, who gave a presentation about Hillary Rodham Clinton's prospects that severed all ties with reality. "We're on the way to locking this nomination down," he said of a candidate who appears, if anything, headed in the other direction.

But before the breakfast crowd had a chance to digest that, they were served another, stranger course by Clinton campaign spokesman Phil Singer. Asked about an accusation on the Drudge Report that Clinton staffers had circulated a photo of Barack Obama wearing Somali tribal dress, Singer let 'er rip.

"I find it interesting that in a room of such esteemed journalists that Mr. Drudge has become your respected assignment editor," he lectured. "I find it to be a reflection of one of the problems that's gone on with the overall coverage of this campaign." He went on to chide the journalists for their "woefully inadequate" coverage of Obama, "a point that has been certainly backed up by the 'Saturday Night Live' skit that opened the show this past Saturday evening, which I would refer you all to."

The brief moment explained everything about the bitter relations between Clinton's campaign and the media: Singer taunting the likes of Broder, who began covering presidential politics two decades before Singer was born, with a comedy sketch that showed debate moderators fawning over Obama.

"That's your assignment editor?" responded Post columnist Ruth Marcus.

"That's my assignment editor," Singer affirmed. 

I noted that particular bit of insanity when it first hit. The Saturday Night Live strategy was nutty when they first used it, it's even crazier that they are pushing it to the press in an antagonistic manner. The Clinton campaign has lost the press corps with this stunt, I suspect.

I can hear that lovely aria, Clinton's staff is apparently as tone deaf as the candidate.

Here's Hillary's uber-secret winning strategy, BTW.