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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."
Earlier, in the absense of adequate infrastructure, people used to depend on local resources - the water table (borewells/rain) for water, small local power stations/generators for electricity, and ofcourse local businesses for banking, etc.
With the coming of the phone system and internet, we work from home, depend on phone services for emergency help, bank with businesses across the country/world, and depend on long distance communications for the most basic needs like water/electricity.
True, these advances in technology offer a large number of benefits and conveniences, but overabundance on them can cause widespread problems due to a failure of a small part of the communication system.
A problem with the electricity grid causes 1/4th of the nation to shut down, people take phone services for granted in order to provide/receive emergency assistance, and there are no adequate backup measures in place.
The internet is a pretty resilient beast, but the rest of the infrastructure (telephone, electricity, water pipes (very few apartments/houses have water storage) is pretty fault-intolerant and prone to massive-widespread failure (not necessarily to the problem with the system itself - in this case a fire). The 911 problem in NYC, this fire in the UK, and ofcourse underline the fact that we either need to have an adequately fault resistant infrastructure in place, or stop overdepending on it for critical services.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
So, do you have a backup phone like to your house that runs over different poles to a different CO?
I didn't think so. There's just no way to make the last mile wire services redundant to an average residence or business in a way that is cost justifiable. Go buy a cell phone.
We were in during the weekend and laid enough cable to bring up basic services by the following Monday, but inhaled unknown quantities of asbestos and compounds released from the burnt plastic and rubber.
Since when does rubber and plastic contain asbestos?
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
If companies bothered to check, MANY would find out that their 'backup' is in the same bundle of wires as their main connection, if not on the SAME strand of fiber. The BBB ought to get on this.
I suppose if you live down south you need a sense of humour what with the cost of housing, cost of living, number of people and time spent sat in traffic jams or squeezed in to public transport.
Probably a safe bet that all the copper that they had down there will go, replaced by glass. Left to their own devices, whomever was owner of the communications cables down there was regularly trying to get just a little bit more out of copper and resisting the expense of going to fibre. The hurdle has now been cleared to replace it as quick as they can, which will be fastest to put in? Copper or glass?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Being one of the early birth places of the industrial revolution is not the best thing in the world, as its infrastructure has been set in stone for decades (for phone service) or centuries (for other things). Now that the old infrastructure is burned out, it leaves room for super modern technology to be put in its place.
The very sad part is that change only comes on the heels of disaster. Perhaps the people in that area will get wireless service until this is resolved?
I'm sure there are places in America that are equally vulnerable, too.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
You mean unlike today, where anything we build now will be payed for by our grandchildren. :-)
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
A) no backups in place
vital emergency ( 999 in the UK ) services got cut off and resulted in ambulance services using cell phone to take emergncy calls ( furthur streching the cell phone system )
b) no fire supression systems in place
it was mentioned in an early post, why was the tunnel not filled with SF6 ( or one of the other gases that supress fire )
c) why do Very HV power cables run through these very same tunnels?
hummmmmm??
Major UK cities - certainly London and Manchester - have existed as proper brick-built towns since the Roman empire around two thousand years ago. That's a LOT of digging, building and rebuilding. Hence it is very difficult to put anything in a city without being noticed - you have to knock something down, or at least disconnect something, first. It's quite common for a builder to discover two thousand year old foundation stones when putting up a new house. So bumping into 50-year-old three-mile-long nuclear bunker isn't exactly going to take much detective work.
Also we have a lot of people in a very small space- our country has 60 million people in an island only 600 miles long. We don't have any unpopulated deserts, mountain ranges or ice shelves where you could go and build an Evil Lair and not be noticed. Anywhere you do anything in the UK, you are going to get spotted by the general public.
During World War 2 there was a massive campaign to make it the average citizen's "duty" to keep quiet about strange millitary goings-on. This carried through to the Cold War. Nowadays, though, the main targets aren't secret bases, they're office blocks and hotels, so this duty of secrecy has faded.
Being a small country, we've never had the room to build enormous Area 51 style secret bases. Guardian (Manchester), Anchor (Birmingham) and Kingsway (London) only have about three miles of tunnels each, and they're the largest in the UK - absolutely tiny in comparison to the ranch estates possible in the USA. So our old bunkers are too small to be useful today and too crammed-in to be extended.
They're of no practical use. That's why you hear about them- because you're allowed to, they're useless. Heck, Guardian doesn't even have exchange equipment inside it any more - only the fiber cabling. Guardian is basically used only as a handy tunnel to save digging up the road- it isn't "secret", it's more "convenient and otherwise worthless" (the problem is, of course, that it was so convenient that they put *most* of Manchester's fibre down there, including most of the backups).
Whereas the US bunkers are presumably big enough and extendable enough to still be in use. So Joe Public isn't going to be poking his nose in there any time soon.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
There is a big difference between "Fuck Off" and "We are afraid to fight"