One monkey managed to cause an electrical outage for all of Kenya – 4.7 million households and businesses – for 15 minutes to more than 3 hours. In order to determine solutions to prevent this from happening again, a thorough analysis of the problem is necessary. We will look at this issue within a Cause Map, a visual form of root cause analysis.
The first step of any problem-solving method is to define the problem. In the Cause Mapping method, the problem is defined with respect to the organization’s goals. In this case, there were several goals that were impacted. If the organization has a goal of ensuring safety of animals, that goal is impacted due to the risk of a fatality or severe injury to the monkey. (In this case, the monkey was unharmed and was turned over to the wildlife service.) The loss of power to 4.7 million businesses and households is an impact to the customer service goal. The nationwide power outage, which lasted from 15 minutes to over 3 hours, is an impact to the production/ schedule goal. Damage to the transformer is an impact to the property goal, and the time required for response and repair is an impact to the labor/ time goal.
The second step of problem-solving is the analysis. Using the Cause Mapping method, cause-and-effect relationships are developed. One of the impacted goals is used as the first effect. Asking “Why” questions is one way to determine cause-and-effect relationships. However, there may be more than one cause required to produce an effect. In this example, the power outage resulted from a cascading effect on the country’s generators. This cascading effect was caused by the loss of a hydroelectric facility, which provides 20% of the country’s electricity, and the unreliability of the power grid, due to aging infrastructure. All of these causes were required for this scenario: had the country had a more reliable power grid or more facilities so that the country was not so dependent on one, the loss of the hydroelectric site would not have resulted in nationwide outage.
Continuing the analysis, the loss of the hydroelectric facility was caused by an overload when a key transformer at the site was tripped. According to the power company, the trip was caused by a monkey falling onto the transformer. (There is also photographic evidence showing a monkey in the area of the transformer.) In order for the monkey to fall onto the transformer, it had to be able to access the transformer. The monkey in this case is believed to have fallen off the roof. How this occurred is still unclear, because the facility is secured by an electric fence designed specifically for protection against “marauding wild animals”.
The last step of problem-solving is to determine solutions, based on the analysis of this problem. The utility says it is “looking at ways of further enhancing security” at all their power plants. Unfortunately, total protection against outages caused by animals is impossible. In the United States, animal-caused outages are believed to cause at least $18 billion in lost economy every year. Just this May, raccoons caused outages to 40,000 in Seattle and 5,600 in Colorado Springs. This year also saw outages caused by squirrels, snakes, starlings and geese. Other unusual outages include work on a transformer causing an outage with economic loss of $118 million in Arizona (see our blog on this subject) and a woman with a shovel who cut internet service to nearly all of Armenia (see our blog on this subject).
Because power outages due to animals and other issues can’t be completely eliminated, ensuring a robust power grid is important to minimize the impact from and duration of outages. Calls for improvements to the aging infrastructure in Kenya have resulted from this incident, but these kinds of solutions require not only the cooperation of the utilities, but the country as a whole.
To view the problem outline and Cause Map for this incident, please click on “Download PDF” above