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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.
So the DHS wants to protect this infrastructure by making the location of such lines protected. Which of course is not going to help the situation because when you call Dig Safe they wont know whats under you. So you run the risk of severing more cables, and you run the risk of injury to the workers. I tip my hats to them.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
That reminds me of when Qwest cut all telephone lines to my home town - including 911. It made the local news, and the police chief and fire chief were both pretty pissed about it. They had to increase police patrols since no one could just call in a crime, fire, or medical emergency.
Fortunately nothing serious happened while 911 was out.
Then Qwest did it again, two days later, on the same line...
Ah, telecom monopolies.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Information Technologist: 0
Red Neck: 1
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."
According to the article, in 2004, nearly half of the accidents were caused by on-site workers not checking with the proper support numbers for underground cables and/or pipelines.
I wonder just how much those incidents would be reduced if companies were fined a stiff penalty for digging without calling these numbers. The type of astronomical fines/penalties levied against virus writers would seem very appropriate in these cases, given the type of economic damage that can be caused by telecom outages.
I'm glad to see that a national calling center is being established (similar to 911, according to the article). Now, it will be easier for workers to call. But I still think we need the other half: better (financial) incentive to make those calls in the first place. -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
In California we are required to notify USA DigAlert before all excavation. DigAlert then notifies all agencies with pipe in the area. Most of the time, they come out and mark, the other times, nobody does.
When nobody comes out an marks, and their line gets hit, it's on them. If it's marked and we hit it, it's on us. Accidents happen. Digging around mismarked and unmarked utilities in a big hole in the ground isn't easy.
Personally I'm more worried about my guys hitting a pressurized gas line than someones precious telco wire. Wire gets fixed in a matter of hours.
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.
In many states there's only one number to call, not several. Anywhere you live in MA (and a bunch of other NE states), you call "Dig Safe" at 1 888 DIG SAFE, tell them the date and location of the dig, and they make sure all the appropriate companies are contacted.
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
Over here in Blighty I've been digging with a little mini backhoe for foundations for a greenhouse and found pipe - rusty iron about two feet down which for an 8 inch main is actually shallow. Put a crack in it, but no leakage fortunately. So we called round and Transco (gas infrastructure) reckoned it was theirs and sent a man out.
A short period of digging later and he came out the hole at some speed looking very pale. The said "pipe" had fins on one end and was delivered 60 years ago by some Germans who failed to stop and advise my grandparents of the delivery.....