[31carmichael]

This is true only if the protection does not operate as designed. They are NOT routinely destroyed by transmission outages. You have been misinformed. Rotating machines cannot overspeed instantly, as they have inertia.

[jeffbee]

Dozens of power plants blew up steam rupture disks during the 2003 northeast outage. EPA, FERC, and NYISO all mention this in their reports.