An old story ...
... but a good one. Learnt this from a colleague who was present at the time.
A certain US hospital way back in the early 90's had installed a highly resilient power system, mostly because of certain issues when they had previously lost power. Basically they had a substantial UPS to handle critical power circuits (e.g. the ICU) for up to 30 minutes, plus a backup diesel generator system that could handle the entire hospital for as long as they kept the fuel tanks topped up. The fuel tanks where regularly checked and the diesel cleaned (no waxing here!); also the whole system was checked out every month by starting up the generators and making sure that they produced the correct power. The UPS only had to handle the load for about the 5 minutes it took the generators to come online (all automatic of course) and spool up to full capacity.
One thing about this setup, the fuel tanks where about 100 yards away from the generator for safety reasons (you do not want large fuel tanks catching fire right next to a hospital) so they hand a pretty impressive fuel pump to get the diesel from point A to point B. Again, this was checked every month.
One day, the inevitable happened - the mains power went off. UPS took over the load fine. The diesel generators powered on and started to handle the load as designed - for about 30 seconds, then they died and could not be restarted. Major panic started; fortunately power was restored before the UPS expired, but it was a close run thing after which many trousers need to be changed.
On investigation it was discovered that the fuel pumps (remember those) had been wired into the mains power feed only, and could not pick up power from the UPS or generators.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
