In the pictures, it appears electric, telephone and cable lines were all
on the utility poles damaged by the fire. I'm not sure why time-warner
cable had the brunt of the outages in the newspaper reports. It may have
just been bad luck on which company's lines got baked (sorry, more bad
puns).
Once upon a time, Mark Smith <random@72616e646f6d20323030342d30342d31360a.nosense.org> said:
A few years back there was a photo floating around of a fibre that had
been destroyed by a stray bullet. Does anybody know of it, or have a
copy ?
When we used to do some cable modem access with one of the local cable
companies, it went down overnight one night. The cable company tracked
it down to the cable being shot off the pole in two places.
The fiber cable hit by bullet was in New Jersey if I'm recalling correctly ... this was maybe four or five years ago. If memory serves (and forty *is* uncomfortably close) this was part of a cable modem plant.
This is Manion's Auction House in Kansas City, Kansas. The photo was taken the day after an F3 tornado went over the top of the site. The smooth, gray rectangle just below the trailer is not parking ... that is the floor of what used to be a ranch home on property which had been hastily tarpapered to protect the basement.
The tornado took the top floor of the house, which contained about twenty PCs, four servers, all of their comm gear, and spread it in a thousand yard long debris field.
Employees turned out and walked the debris field finger tip to finger tip, looking for customer consigned property and the contents of their office. They found every PC, every server, and every bit of communcations equipment. No one thought to take a picture of their Cisco 3640, which was found under a Catepillar D-7 bulldozer which had been rolled two hundred yards by the storm.
The business owner's house is just to the left of the area covered by the photo and it suffered minor damage. Their systems were brought there to a room in the basement and the IT guys set to work. Monitors were destroyed but every single PC was located and found to be operational. They lost one drive in one raid array on their servers but everything else was functional. We plugged their 3640, Local Director, and firewall back in and had them running again five hours after the storm, and that included my three hour drive time from Omaha.
They had no off site backup of any of their data and there was no configuration information on their network beyond my recall of what I'd help install two years before the tornado. This is certainly a testament to the value of clean livin', but I sure wouldn't recommend that as a DR strategy.
This is more common in some areas of the country than other areas.
Shooters will take potshots at microwave towers, cables of all
types on utility poles, and even the occasional electrical transformer.
The shot itself may not cause an immediate outage, but the hole lets
rain in causing an outage later. They also shoot stop signs, mailboxes
and just about everything else.
They had no off site backup of any of their data and there was no configuration information on their network beyond my recall of what I'd help install two years before the tornado. This is certainly a testament to the value of clean livin', but I sure wouldn't recommend that as a DR strategy.
This is still my favorite tornado/network related item:
Back in the early days I was out of the town for I think one of the first times ever after starting the business (at ISPC maybe?). I logged on to see a huge drop in the number of people dailed up at a time when it should have been going up. I was a bit freaked out when I noticed at the same time the temperature had fallen 40 degrees in about 20 minutes. A quick call home let me connect the dots.
I used to have a customer who were in the forestry business. They had
a hundred miles or so of railroad down South that went from one of
their sawmills to places that had lots of trees, and ran some telecom
cables along them. Where they had bridges, the cables would hang
underneath the bridges. They had some cable problems during the rainy
season, due to wetness, but they also ran into problems during hunting
season with guys named Bubba who'd shoot at birds on their cables
(presumably when they were taking a break from their day job of
driving backhoes...)