To their credit, the control rooms of power companies are full of screens, and these are full of data, charts and colors and rows of text, and control room operators are highly dependent on alarm systems that are either audible or flash on their screen, calling attention to critical changes in the flow of information. Without these alarms it’s questionable whether any normal human being is capable of noticing critical shifts in data patterns or laggardly mechanical behavior. And the alarms that day in FirstEnergy’s system didn’t work. Neither the onscreen alarms nor the speaker-blasted ones.
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