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The Backhoe, The Internet's Natural Enemy
Juha-Matti Laurio writes "Experts say last week's Sprint outage is a reminder that with all the attention paid to computer viruses and the latest Windows security holes, the most vulnerable threads in America's critical infrastructures lie literally beneath our feet. A study issued last month by the Common Ground Alliance, or CGA -- an industry group comprised of utilities and construction companies -- calculated that there were more than 675,000 excavation accidents in 2004 in which underground cables or pipelines were damaged." I estimate that one third of those accidents occured within the 5 block radius surrounding my office.
Always carry a length of fiber-optic cable in your pocket. Should you be shipwrecked and find yourself stranded on a desert island, bury the cable in the sand. A few hours later, a guy driving a backhoe will be along to dig it up. Ask him to rescue you.
Information Technologist: 0
Red Neck: 1
We have had SBC Yahoo DSL at home for about 6 or 7 years now. A few years ago when comcast was "upgrading" our cable service for HDTV, their crew managed to cut through the telephone line buried in the ground outside our house, which killed our internet and phone service! I think they train them to do that. In the time it took SBC to come and repair it, we could have potentially switched over to cable?
:X
is this what they were thinking?
Argh i give up! Those conniving small minded cable companies
--
Keepin' it real over at http://wi-fizzle.com/!
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
That's like saying that the gun kills, and not the person holding the gun. So much for another Slashdot article title.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Holes! define who vee are, und vhere vee are going.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Based on this article, I'd hazard it's either:
1: Backhoes falling off ships transporting them hitting cables.
2: Submarines with backhoes, no doubt performing black ops at the time.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
At our company, we are trying to figure out how to use cable over telephone pole (business class cable) as a backup in case we get "dug up", which would provide a new level of reliability, but I am sure somewhere out there there is still some unavoidable single point of failure that no amount of money can overcome.
A backhoe driver that accidentally digs up your cable, and then backs into the telephone pole?
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
I worked for a company that built the network for a new building on the University campus. The main feed was a 1200 foot run of fiber. It was put in, terminated and tested and all was good. 2 Days later the line was ripped in half by a backhoe from the company they contracted to do the plumbing.
Rumors said the guy was fired due to failing a drug test.
Every time I see a backhoe go by I go into an Elmer Fudd voice and say, "Be wery wery qwiet... I'm hunting fiber"
For some reason the Servers and Networks guys don't think it is funny.
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
Those of use from the telecom world recoginze
this as "backhoe fade" and ARPA has conducted
considable research on the effect of fiber
optic cable to attrace backhoes in the wild...
ARPA Science Research Funding News Today......
ARPA to Fund Network Reliability Research
Washington, DC -
The Advanced Research Projects Agency of the DoD announced today they are
funding a three-year effort to improve the field reliability of
fiber-optic communications networks. The program is aimed at reducing
network outages from damage to buried fiber optic cables caused by
construction machinery. Many telecommunications outages are caused each
year when machines called "backhoes" dig-up underground fibers, cutting
them and causing massive service disruptions.
This phenomenon is commonly referred to as "backhoe fade" and
the uncanny ability of the construction backhoe to locate buried
cables will be the focus of this effort.
Dr. Zweiback Gimfizel of the Marginalia Institute of Technoplasty
has been designated Principle Investigator on the project and
held a news conference today and described the proposed line of
research.
"We are taking a page from the biologists who discovered
the magnetic organ in the brains of homing pigeon. This
organ senses the earth's magnetic field and allows the
pigeon to track its location.
"In like manner, our research will focus
on identifying the specialized organ structure within
the backhoe that can somehow sense the location of glass
fibers."
"The hope is that if this fiber-seeking mechanism can be
identified, measures can be developed to disguise
telecommunications cables, thereby creating "stealth"
fiber bundles which will not attract the attention of
the rampaging backhoes."
In another unrelated statement today, ARPA announced the creation of the
Remote Autonomous Rodent Program which will work on developing specialized
weapons systems for attacking the underground communications systems of
adversaries. In recent theater actions, modern fiber-optic communications
systems have proven quite resilient to traditional attacks and require
new techniques to disable them.
Dr. Gimback Zweifizel of Hardly Yardwell University was designated
Principle Investigator. In a prepared statement, Dr. Zweifizel noted that
this work program was funded for three years and was to produce a field
demonstration of a working system. Other details of the project are
classified.
What would Groucho do?
The Common Yellow Backhoe
The Common Yellow Backhoe attempting to hide from view.
The Hammer Backhoe evolved to fit particular niches.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I've actually created my own internet outages with my (now sold) backhoe, twice. Neither of them the obvious. I had a 802.11b feed from a neighbor's house, 1.1 miles away (my hill to his tower). Worked great, almost always. Finally figured out that if I parked my backhoe at --> that end of the back yard, it was enough into the fresnel zone of the wireless link that things got wodgy.
Next time I created backhoe fade, was again in an unexpected way. I'd been trenching along the driveway, after dutifully and carefully marking the underground phone line to the house (that the brain-trust from the phone company decided to run next to my driveway, despite instructions not to). I carefully and successfully avoided the cable, no worries there. Then, when reaching juuuuuuust a bit too far over, I got the backhoe stuck in the muddy ditch along the road. Apparently, in the effort to get un-stuck, I pressed down on the cable, which then stretched over a rock in the trench and broke.
The phone company (eventually) got out there and tried to say I dug it up. I showed 'em exactly what happened - yes, I'd been digging. Yes, the wire was marked. Yes, none of my digging was along the wire's path (all true). The cable had clear marks of a pull over a rock, not a cut from a hoe. Shear vs. tension, obvious from inspection.
Phone company guy didn't want any part of explainations until I (a) bet him that I could dig right (made an X) here and find a big rock with a sharp edge "that you people left in the trench of this improperly installed wire", and (b) pointed out that if he's gonna dig the trench, he's standing in poison ivy while doing so, and I could just go get the backhoe and make it easier for all involved.
He called his boss, explained the high points of the situation (including the poison ivy, which inexplicably a guy in his job didn't recognize without help), and they fixed the cable no charge. But, I bet I'm one of those statistcs in the article.
This is defiantly true though. Living in a fairly recent subdivision, back when the construction was closer to my house this would happen all the time. The phone. The cable. The internet. Even the power once.
I think it's clear what we need to do: go kill all the backhoes.
Save the internet!
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
From your link:
> The telco is now suing the vessel...
Darn right! Why the hell didn't the ship call Miss Utility and have lines drawn in the water before recklessly dropping an anchor into the water?
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
backhoes were originally created to fight elephants?
...That way, when he gets lost, he drops the fiber on the ground, waits ten minutes, then asks the operator of the backhoe cutting the fiber for directions.
Simple, easy, flaw (which I'm sure you've already thought of) -- human error. Like the time the construction worker started digging a hole next to my house right on top of the orange paint mark specifying the location of my phone line.
The funniest thing was the foreman trying to fix the line, since the phone company (thank you, SBC) said they'd take a day or two to get there. He was shocked (literally) to find out that phone lines carry electricity. :-)
Anyone know if this was on digg.com already? : p
This guy's the limit!
Just carry a deck of playing cards with you everywhere. If you're ever lost, start playing solitare. Someone will be along in five minutes or so to tell you to move the black jack to the red queen.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
We have the same sort of thing in Virginia "MISS Utility"... the problem is, they aren't required to respond in a timely manor. One of my friends had called it, a number of utilities came out and marked them within the next few days. Excavation began, a pool went in, a deck, some concrete, and then a second power guy came out and figured out that a 33kv powerline ran about 24"-36" underground right through the middle of the pool that was already complete with water and being used. Luckily they only dug down 18" for the pool...
-=JML=-
Well in the jarjon used by telcom techs, a sudden and innexplicable loss of 100% of your signal on your T1 line is called a backhoe fade for a reason ;)
Said in that Australian accent we've come to know and love:
Today I'm going to show you one of the wonders of nature. If you look down in that hole there you can long fibrous tendrils. Those are fiber optic cables and they snake their way through the ground all over the world.
Crikey, it's nice to see them. Usually they stay underground so this is really special. Just look at the size of the hole they make as they burrow through the earth.
Oh look! I didn't expect this. The only known enemy to these folks is coming over to investigate. The backhoe. Look at those nasty pointed teeth. I wouldn't want to get caught by them I'll tell you.
I'll just walk away so I don't disturb him. This could get real exciting any moment.
*growl* *snort* dig dig dig dig
Look at that! This is a real treat. The backhoe is digging up the fiber optic! Look at the way those teeth just dig into the soil and expose those poor buggers. Oh wow, just look at it as it tears those fibers to ribbons.
I know it may seem cruel to stand by and do nothing but this is part of nature. Someone has to eat and someone has to be eaten.
But don't worry mate, those fiber optics grow back real quick. In fact, they grow so quickly there will never be a shortage of them no matter how many get eaten by the backhoe.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
At one of my previous jobs, we had popped for the whole menu of auto-whizbang-failover magic. Redundant routers, redundant switches, redundant connections from separate providers. Protected to the nuts against outages.
Imagine our surprise when early the first spring after installing all of this, our connection went down. Both T's out. We were more than a little perplexed - the way the odds were explained to us, God himself would've had to smite most of the southeast US to make this happen.
It turns out that it wasn't God, and there was no smiting involved. Instead, over certain stretches, provider #2 was leasing fiber from provider #1, and one of these stretches ran under the edge of a farmer's field in Georgia. Come spring, the farmer comes out with his backhoe, and... well, you know.
For as long as I was there, we were guaranteed at least a half a day of outage somewhere around the beginning of spring. Every time, the problem was eventually reported to us as "A fiber cut in Georgia..." They never would tell us if it was the same farmer every time.
"Hey, the third matrix movie would have been good except for the plot,story, and acting." --AC
Is that what that was? I thought we'd found Jimmy Hoffa! I guess we can tell CSI:Backhoe that there's no hurry.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Transport Canada (who were responsible for Airports at the time) used to call them "cable finders".