MA
Marcus
Founding member
This email is being sent to all BBC staff
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I'm sure that everyone is concerned that we lost all of our television transmissions, as well as some digital radio and World Service output, last Saturday evening at about 9.30pm for 20 minutes. I certainly am! As you can imagine a major post mortem has been going on all this week. I have met with the relevant members of the Executive Committee and our transmission and engineering people to find out firstly what happened and secondly what actions need to be taken to avoid this happening again in the future.
The basic facts of what happened is that a main safety “trip-switch” was activated. This broke the supply of power to our transmission systems at Television Centre. This not only meant there was no power getting through, it also prevented our back-up systems from being able to supply an alternative source of power to our playout operations.
We are undertaking a careful and detailed piece of work to understand precisely why the trip-switch was activated and hope to have the answer fairly soon. In the meantime, we have moved swiftly to ensure that we have as much protection as possible by reconfiguring the back-up power supply systems already in place.
For the medium and longer term we will be undertaking a full appraisal of our back-up systems to ensure maximum protection against the risk of future blackouts across all BBC services. We will also be exploring how, in the event that a blackout did affect transmissions in future, we can minimise any disruption. Obviously Saturday's events were very serious for the BBC and we must do everything we can to ensure that this does not happen again.
Finally, I would like to express my thanks to everyone who worked to restore our services at the weekend. It is clear that everybody involved did a great job to get us back on air in what must have been, to say the least, a tense and stressful situation.
Yours
Greg
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I'm sure that everyone is concerned that we lost all of our television transmissions, as well as some digital radio and World Service output, last Saturday evening at about 9.30pm for 20 minutes. I certainly am! As you can imagine a major post mortem has been going on all this week. I have met with the relevant members of the Executive Committee and our transmission and engineering people to find out firstly what happened and secondly what actions need to be taken to avoid this happening again in the future.
The basic facts of what happened is that a main safety “trip-switch” was activated. This broke the supply of power to our transmission systems at Television Centre. This not only meant there was no power getting through, it also prevented our back-up systems from being able to supply an alternative source of power to our playout operations.
We are undertaking a careful and detailed piece of work to understand precisely why the trip-switch was activated and hope to have the answer fairly soon. In the meantime, we have moved swiftly to ensure that we have as much protection as possible by reconfiguring the back-up power supply systems already in place.
For the medium and longer term we will be undertaking a full appraisal of our back-up systems to ensure maximum protection against the risk of future blackouts across all BBC services. We will also be exploring how, in the event that a blackout did affect transmissions in future, we can minimise any disruption. Obviously Saturday's events were very serious for the BBC and we must do everything we can to ensure that this does not happen again.
Finally, I would like to express my thanks to everyone who worked to restore our services at the weekend. It is clear that everybody involved did a great job to get us back on air in what must have been, to say the least, a tense and stressful situation.
Yours
Greg