2019 Hurricane Season Begins June 1st, Are You Prepared?
Compared to last year’s devastating Atlantic hurricane season, it seems this year’s will be a bit of a reprieve. According to the Weather Company’s forecast, released Monday, we’ll have a “slightly less active” Atlantic hurricane season than in 2018. But even this less active season can produce powerful tempests: We’re in store for a projected 14 named storms, including 7 hurricanes, of which 3 are major hurricanes (category 3 to 5). The season starts June 1 and continues until November 30, although tropical storms occasionally strike outside that period.
"This year’s forecast is around normal, based on records dating back about 70 years", says Todd Crawford, chief meteorologist at the Weather Company. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an average hurricane season has 12 named storms, 6 hurricanes, and 3 major hurricanes. Hurricanes are tropical cyclones in which winds reach 74 miles per hour, and they’re rated on a category 1 to 5 scale based on wind speeds.
Happy Memorial Day From Loftin Equipment Co.
From all of us at Loftin Equipment Co., we wish you a fun and safe Memorial Day weekend. While we enjoy the weekend with family and friends, we remember those that gave their lives for our country and those who serve today. Thank you for your service.
The Impacts of 2018 Blackouts by Industry
EATON Blackout Tracker Annual Report 2018
The costs and consequences of power outages are often difficult to calculate and can vary dramatically depending on the industry.
A 2016 Ponemon Institute study estimated
the cost of a U.S. data center outage
has grown to $8,851 per minute. The
toll can scale even higher for healthcare
organizations, which face an average cost
of $690,000 per outage, according to
Ponemon. That price tag doesn’t even factor
in how the loss of power at hospitals can be
life threatening. Manufacturers and financial
service companies also tend to suffer
significantly from blackouts, as do industries
that deal with perishable products, from
food to pharmaceuticals.
Data Centers
Not even corporate giants are immune
to power outages, a reality Amazon and
Microsoft discovered firsthand in 2018.
Amazon blamed human error for a March
2 outage that took down scores of large
internet sites for several hours. The company
said an employee who was debugging a
billing system issue accidentally took more
servers offline than intended. That misstep
initiated a domino effect that knocked out
other server subsystems, including those
that are part of S3, Amazon’s popular web
hosting service. When the S3 servers went
down, they disrupted web services for
numerous Amazon clients, including Quora,
Trello and IFTTT.
Healthcare
Sometimes access to continuous, clean
power is literally a matter of life and death.
Numerous medical facilities across the nation
were forced to evacuate patients throughout
2018 due to power outages. Thankfully, Fort
Lauderdale, Fla.-based Kindred Hospital was
able to transfer eight critically ill patients on
ventilators to nearby Broward Health Medical
Center after a May 11 blackout left the facility
without power.
Education
Affecting learning institutions from
preschools through universities, the past
year’s blackouts made it clear the education
sector lacks a lesson plan for escaping the
impacts of power outages. Not even the
nation’s most prestigious campuses are
immune from unexpected cuts, as Stanford
University discovered on Oct. 24 when a
cable failure knocked out power to about 50
buildings on the sprawling campus. The cut
not only forced classes to be cancelled, but
also posed an alarming safety risk. At the
time, there were students working in labs
with hazardous materials, all of whom were
told to immediately stop their experiments
and leave the building.
Architects, designers, and builders are key target groups for Loftin Equipment Co. and now with BIM Objects, the world’s leading manufacturer specific content provider, they have free access to the products we represent.
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Data Center UL 3223 Standards For Generator Set Systems
This Information Sheet discusses how UL 3223 affects the application of generator set systems used by data centers and what specifications are used for generator
sets providing power to data centers.