The 26-page report from DHittle & Associates of Lynnwood, released Thursday, recommends changes in Department of General Administration procedures to avoid putting workers at undue risk. And it lays out some $300,000 in repairs to equipment damaged by what it says were two outages.
“Specifically, we feel that GA should treat this as a ‘near miss’ where someone could have been seriously hurt or killed during the repeated ‘closing’ of a faulted primary power circuit,” the report released Thursday by GA said.
The report goes went on to say “‘group pressure’ to meet schedules may have caused the Parallel Electric and GA electrical workers to push forward” to re-energize the power system before knowing why it had shorted out.
“This one’s on GA. We should have been better prepared,” agency spokesman Steve Valandra said.
Valandra added that two red flags should have halted the work to repower the system that day: power diagrams that differed from what workers found on the ground and in an underground power vault near the GA building.
GA is not letting agency employees do work on high-voltage power equipment until training is held in November, Valandra said. An internal review is under way to determine whether employee sanctions are needed.
GA also is ending its contract with Parallel Electric and plans to hire Potelco to finish the job after DHittle & Associates completes design work. Spokesmen for Parallel Electric did not return calls asking for comment.
A GA staffer and electrician with the contractor stood close to a power switch as they flipped it on in an underground vault near the GA building, after the first outage was repaired. The resulting arc caused a flash of light and could have sent a high-voltage pulse into them.
The outage that blackened the entire campus grew out of a more localized repair project on the west campus. The outages ended up lasting about eight hours, with power restored around 8:30 p.m.
The secondary outage forced the state to use back-up diesel generators, delayed two days’ worth of unemployment claims by a day, and disrupted police access to some computerized records in a Department of Information Services data center.
The Department of Information Services temporarily lost use of servers in its OB 2 data center, which still is operating while the state’s new data-center complex is outfitted.
As GA waits until next year to begin some repairs, it has locked the vault and plans to bar entry to crews until upgrades can be made. A second vault also might need repairs.
Brad Shannon: 360-753-1688
bshannon@theolympian.com
www.theolympian.com/politicsblog
