[net.columbia] Cause of Houston electrical fire

karn (11/15/82)

Contrary to my earlier unofficial rumor, the cause for the
electrical fire that took the tracking displays down at Houston last
night for about 2 hours was a faulty splice in aluminum building wiring.

There are four power busses feeding control room equipment, one of which
was feeding the tracking computers.  This was the one that failed.

The outage occurred because it was not a critical portion of the flight.
Had it been (e.g., launch, landing), they would have been running a
backup computer on a different circuit and changeover would have been
almost instantaneous.