Major UK Comms Backbone Bunker Burned Out

evilandi writes "The BBC are reporting that much of Manchester, England is without telephone service following a fire in a major underground tunnel system. The site in question is strongly suspected to be the 'Guardian' nuclear communications bunker system which is one of the main three UK subterranean communications backbone bunkers. The giveaway is this regional BBC news story which mentions Chapel Street, one of the very few entrance/exit points to the 'Guardian' system. If confirmed, Manchester could be without wired communications for some time. The MANAP Manchester Network Access Point regional Internet hub is officially reporting nothing, but a number of UK admins are seeing significant disruption."

Comments

Not even close to most of the city

[Ion Berkley]

Manchester has a population comfortably in excess of 1 Million people and a large buisness centre. 100K dead telephones represents only a small but significant amount of the city.

Re:Not even close to most of the city

[Dynamoo]

100K dead lines in the central business district is a wipeout, plus most data systems have been wiped out and the mobile telephone system is struggling with all the extra load.

We've got patchy and intermittant ISDN connectivity to our Manchester office, but we're not expecting anything close to even a normal backup service for days. We've shunted work out to other regional offices to cover.

OK, it's bad, but worse things have happened. Remember when the IRA blew Manchester city centre up? No lives have been lost and everything will be back to normal soon. ish.

Re:Oh no!

[Stween]

The worry is more the emergency services, and elderly people.

The BBC news report I saw earlier on stated that BT planned on issuing mobile phones temporarily to people elderly living in sheltered housing.

Duncan Campbell's other project - Echelon

[billstewart]

It's interesting, and not surprising, to see a Duncan Campbell byline on the research. Duncan became well-known in the mid-90s for doing the journalistic work to publicize the NSA's Echelon wiretapping-the-world system. http://www.gn.apc.org/duncan/ has some older articles of his.

'secret cold war tunnel'

[will]

This tunnel was described on our regional BBC tv news as a 'secret conduit between Manchester and Salford built during the cold war to safeguard communications'. I quote roughly. They also mentioned that it was 40 metres down.

All this was accompanied by some very Dr Strangelove images of corrugated tunnels and antiquated switchgear, a smooth man from British Telecom (who seemed very calm for someone whose secret underground nuclear bunker was on fire) and the sad beeping of disconnected call centre workers trying to close deals with each other.

Spoke to someone who lives near

[PatrickThomson]

BT and vodaphone are down, Sporadic towns as far out as chapel-en-le-frith are out, internet is out, 50 firemen were in the tunnel at one point, and I think a 6kv line was involved. Fortunately my Aunt lives far enough out to still have a phone :D

Personal perspective

[Rich]

This morning I got I text message from my boss about the problem and left for work after seeing that my own home ADSL connection was ok. I arrived at work to find that we had no phones (other than mobiles) and the our leased line was dead. We got phones back around 1pm but the leased line was still AWOL when I left work at around 6pm.

I visited the site of the fire (well, the ground above the site!) at lunch time, and the streets were still full of fire engines and other emergency services.

I'm told by our ISP that they are unsure of the extent of the damage but hope to get things back by tomorrow. I left a cronjob running that should mail me here every hour and so far I've heard nothing from it, so I suspect tomorrow will be spent getting colocated facilities activated.

More News

[amigoro]

From Manchester Evening News

EMERGENCY services, homes and businesses were hit after an underground fire in Manchester city centre cut 130,000 phone lines.

The blaze, in a tunnel by the junction of George Street and Princess Street, destroyed cables connected to the national phone network.

Related News:

No time limit for Manchester phone lines fix
Fire wipes out internet in Manchester
BT tunnel fire cuts off Manchester phone lines
BT fire disrupts emergency services
Businesses hit by BT fire
Phones Out of Action after Fire in Tunnel
Tunnel fire knocks out phone network

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Re:Strange

[Uber Banker]

I live in the area and allis working fine. ~120k lines is not even near all of Manchester. Though I did notice UT04 central internet server was not working earlier I can't believe this is solely dependent on the gay area of Manchester.

Re:Northeners

[plugger]

No, I think you will find it's one of the places where the industrial revolution started.

Re:Ping? *sizzle*

[Wanderer2]

guardian.co.uk is the web site of "The Guardian", a British newspaper.

...which used to be named 'The Manchester Guardian' (which you probably already knew, I just couldn't resist pointing it out). Of course, its offices are in London now, which spoils the original joke somewhat.

Re:Whoa.. where is the redunancy

[spectecjr]

I must ask - WHERE IS THE REDUNDANCY. Everyone with any sense knows you do not have a critical hub like that without having geographically seperate backup.


Edinburgh and London are the backups, according to what a friend of mine once told me.

This friend was one who worked on pulling out the last analogue switching units from that particular underground exchange. He had a tape of the sound the analogue exchange made before they pulled it out too... 'twas fascinating.

Right now, most calls are bypassing Manchester, and going to the other two main trunk stations - and if you're calling from Birmingham, you're probably going through Edinburgh to get to your destination.

Re:Northeners

[Goth Biker Babe]

Far from being the backward place you believe it to be Manchester was one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution; one end of one of the earliest Railway systems in the world (the Liverpool to Manchester for which speed trials were held where Stephenson's Rocket won); and the birthplace of digital stored program computers.

MaNap is fine

[sprouty76]

I work at a fairly major ISP/telco based in Manchester, we're seeing no direct disruption to MaNap. MaNap isn't actually sited in a single location, it's more of a virtual entity than a physical one. Some individual sites are struggling, but that's fairly obvious.

I live near the site of the fire, I work for a telco and yet the most significant disruption I've seen to my life was the traffic around Manchester City Centre!

Re:Manchester Unplugged

[Dun Malg]

They don't, but pyrolosys of complex materials is a fairly undpredictable process...You know that the products are going to consist of the same elements as the reactants, but that's about it. There are many, many toxic chemicals that are produced from burning synthetic materials.

Asbestos isn't manufactured, it's mined: it's a fibrous mineral and totally combustion-proof. It's wholly impossible for asbestos to result from burning wire jacket unless the asbestos was there to begin with. Unless the building has very old, very illegal electrical wiring, there was no asbestos. Now, it is possible that there was some asbestos insulation in the cable ducting that went unnoticed and he meant "we inhaled unknown quantities of: (asbestos) and (crap from burning wire insulation)".

Manchester Computing Data Centre Unaffected

[gpuk]

I am a student at Manchester University and have a server in the University's spin-off colocation facility (which is a MaNAP expansion member). We have experienced no downtime or outages.

Different kinds of fixes

[billstewart]

The amount of time to fix it depends on what kinds of facilities they're running through the tunnel.

• If the building that a phone switch is in catches fire, that's severely ugly, potentially weeks before most people have service.
• Copper Cables connecting telco offices to end-users usually aren't diverse; if you lose a bundle of them, it's really annoying - splicing big fat bundles of copper takes days, and it's going to be a few days before it's safe to go into the tunnel and assess the damage, much less fix it.
• Fiber optic long-haul trunks connecting telco offices *shouldn't* be a big problem, unless they've done a really bad job of diversity planning. They're usually arranged in ring or mesh topologies, with enough excess capacity that they can reroute the traffic around any (single) failures. In the US (at least for the telco I work for), that rerouting would happen in seconds or minutes, if there's enough capacity available to restore all the service, and the rest of it would be scrounged up with manual intervention, usually much faster than physical restoration (certainly true in this case.) For short stretches of physical restoration around damage (they have a mile here, which is a bit long), it's not uncommon to run temporary fiber above ground on poles or in as protected a route as you can cobble together, and post a bunch of guys in orange vests to watch it until they get the regular circuit rebuilt.
• Fiber circuits to local end-users (mostly large businesses) and fibers feeding local telephone-copper concentrators are normally built in rings, with enough spacing between them that they're not supposed to have multiple failures from a single event, and restoration is simple and happens in under a second. The main exception to this is supposed to be multiple simultaneous failures - TWO street construction crews not checking before they dig, or a big flood.

The description of the "44 bundles of 24 fibers" sounds like long-haul, but maybe it's metro ring stuff. This sounds disturbingly like they had a bunch of access that wasn't diverse enough, because they assumed that the tunnels were safe from careless backhoe drivers, but maybe it's not that bad.