Fingers on the Buttons

It was a control room like all the rest, an almost sterile cavern buried deep within a beige, nondescript building. It had no windows. A color-coded plot plan of the “system” stretched across three walls. A handful of men in slacks and shirt sleeves sat at consoles, pushing a button or two, watching data flash across video screens.

At times they would speak laconically to one another over the somnolent whir of computer fans. It was a shorthand not easily deciphered by outsiders.

“They want to recycle off tonight at Long Beach.”

“That didn’t work too well last night for Cool Water.”

“Yeah, I guess not. Heh.”

With the flick of a finger on a keyboard, or a quick telephone call or two, these Southern California Edison Co. employees could make whole cities go dark. They could fire up power plants scattered about Southern California. They could throw open floodgates to pull water from high mountain reservoirs into their hydro plants. They could zap electricity across the West at a speed of 186,000 miles a second.

In short, the machine that lights the whole Western United States was theirs to manipulate, was literally at their fingertips. And yet, until two Saturdays ago, when a group of power lines sagged into some trees outside Portland, triggering a chain reaction that would create widespread blackout, who knew that this room even existed? Who could imagine that the power to run a dishwasher in Los Angeles might depend some hot Saturday afternoon on the diligence of Oregon tree trimmers? Who knew there was a Western grid at all?

*

Inside the SCE Energy Control Center late last Wednesday, I was struck by how familiar it seemed. This could have been the operations cubicle at the Jet Propulsion Lab, where I once watched computer operators whip unmanned spacecraft around the planets. Or the State Water Project’s Operation Center, up in suburban Sacramento, where button-pushers control the dams and canals that carry California’s water from north to south.

I’m always amazed by the incongruity, the audacity, of these control rooms. Here are the most wonderful machines, lighting half a continent, navigating the solar system, irrigating an entire state--and all run by computer operators who seem, to any outside eye, almost interchangeable. They look alike, dress alike, talk alike. More than anything, though, they tend to share a singular immunity to the wonder, the poetry, of the machine works at their fingertips.

Once, in a similar bunker, I asked a State Water Project operator if he ever tried to visualize the water itself as he sent it tumbling from reservoirs. Could he picture it snaking down the aqueduct, spreading across fields, splashing from suburban taps?

He stared at me a long time, wondering, I imagined, whether to push the button that would summon security. Finally, he answered:

“Nope. Not really.”

Now there was one column that did not get written.

*

At the SCE control room, one story at least did get told. Steve McCoy was on duty when the blackout hit. Some generating plants had been knocked out, and within minutes McCoy realized that to regain the all-important equilibrium between consumption and generation--the first step toward restoring the entire SCE system--some still-

functioning substations would need to be taken down. With each shutdown, another swath of the metropolis would go dark.

“And so we started shedding load,” he said. “We went down a list. The third substation was Villa Park. We called them and told them to start shedding load. I understood what that would mean. Sure enough, about a minute later, my daughter called. She said, ‘Dad, the lights just went out.’ ” He giggled. “Boy, did I know it.”

What fascinates me about the anecdote is not that McCoy cut power to his own neighborhood, his own house: He had no choice. What fascinates me is that he could. In the end, I suppose, most people--present company certainly included--simply don’t know much about the mechanics of modern life. “They don’t need to,” insisted Gary Tarplee, the manager of the SCE Control Center. “That’s our job. . . . They just need to know that, if they flip the switch, a light will come on.”

Yes, but what about when the light does not come on? Going into the control room, it had seemed more than a little spooky that so much country could go dark so fast. I left reassured--after a crash course in basic electronics and intrastate power-swapping--that this likely was as bad as it can get: the equivalent of a flood that stretches a mile wide, but only a few inches deep. The experience suggested the wisdom in cutting some windows in the vaulted rooms where the big machines are run. Sitting in the dark, what we don’t know sometimes can scare us.