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Catastrophic failures of power systems are phenomena which occur with some regularity throughout the world. It is recognized that these cannot be prevented, although with the use of newer developments in power engineering, in communication systems, and in computer engineering it would be possible to reduce their frequency and their impact on society. Analyses of many blackouts point to some salient features which are common to most such events: power systems under stress because of high load levels or outages of important facilities, some initiating event-usually a fault, often followed by cascading effects due to unwanted operation of some protection systems. In particular, the role of hidden failures (HFs) in protection systems in propagating power system disturbances has become clearer with some of the recent research reported in the literature. This paper explores further the issue of HFs of protection …