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Vandalism In Arizona Shuts Down Internet and Phone Service
schwit1 sends news that vandalism on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona knocked out internet and telephone service for hours across much of the state's northern region. ATMs, credit card functionality, and emergency services were all affected.
Officers are trying to determine who cut through a pipe containing a fiber-optic cable on the outskirts of the city, leading to the outage on Wednesday, which hit northern Phoenix and large parts of the north of Arizona. ... The four-inch-thick pipe, which carries a CenturyLink cable, was found sliced through in an area where it is exposed to the elements as it crosses a desert wash about a quarter of a mile from a residential area, Holmes said. Police said the investigation is in its early stages, but that the pipe may have been vandalized by thieves looking to steal metal.
"Act of terrorism!"
Unfortunately this part of life, I have seen so many fibre cuts it is not funny. People can argue for redunancy, but there is only so much you can do.
Obviously this was the work of terrorists plotting to disable the NSA.
Better call the TSA! They will make short work of it!
One Pipe to bind them.
More likely it was just someone that AT&T pissed off. Just ask AT&T for a list of all the people they have screwed and you'll have an abundance of suspects.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Where I live, metal thefts are fairly commonplace, although requiring recycles to keep ID records has helped. If there isn't a guard at a construction site, it won't be surprising for any copper to disappear, as well as A/C condenser units smashed open with the compressor gone.
Of course, the thieves that were looking for fiber really don't know/care what they cut... they just realize they are not getting a gob of meth for it.
Without a doubt it was some meth(or whatever druggie is native to the region) heads looking to steal some wire to sell to a scrapper.
That sort of crime is endemic to most rural/impoverished/remote regions of the US now.
That doesn't even make sense. There have got to be a bunch of easier ways to steal metal than going out of your way to find the exposed pipe that just happens to contain out a bunch of important fibre.
These police are complete fucking idiots if they think this was the motive. It's quite obvious the objective wasn't theft, it was just to cause damage.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Fibre-seeking llamas!
meth heads have all the concentration and none of the frontal lobe action, they even try to steal live high-tension lines. which are aluminum around a steel core, nothing there but electrocution, folks.
my sleepy little weekly has a copper theft just about every other week when it's not cold enough to kill outside. cut open a container, clamp the wire to a bumper, and GO! that's even easier than breaking into a vacant house and cutting all the wire and plumbing out, although the little darlings probably are stripping that 24 gauge for days before they can sell it as bare wire.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Fibre look like copper to the ignorant
These police are complete fucking idiots if they think this was the motive. It's quite obvious the objective wasn't theft, it was just to cause damage.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity/greed.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
No, it was most likely metal thieves. There's tons and tons of them in Phoenix, since that city is chock full of meth-heads and illegal aliens, both of whom steal any metal they can get their hands on so they can take them to the metal recyclers in South Phoenix and get a few bucks. They've had all kinds of problems with metal theft there for a long time; not only are new-home construction sites frequently burgled of their wire and copper pipe, they've even resorted to stealing catalytic converters from vehicles in parking lots (using a portable reciprocating saw).
There's been lots of cases of metal thieves trying to steal electric wire from high-voltage installations and being killed in the process.
So much for net neutrality, it did not end well in Arizona.
You might want to try out some grammar and punctuation while calling others ignorant.
One way of stealing is hook up a pickup truck and try and pull long lengths of copper wire out of the conduits
That doesn't even make sense. There have got to be a bunch of easier ways to steal metal than going out of your way to find the exposed pipe that just happens to contain out a bunch of important fibre.
These police are complete fucking idiots if they think this was the motive. It's quite obvious the objective wasn't theft, it was just to cause damage.
Or maybe they were smart criminals who had some other crime to perform but wanted the communications of the emergency services to be impaired before they got down to some serious doing of crimes. There may be a bank somewhere in Northern AZ that is still trying to call the police.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Shut, up, you, grammar, nazi.
>That doesn't even make sense. There have got to be a bunch of easier ways to steal metal than going out of your way to find the exposed pipe that just happens to contain out a bunch of important fibre.
>These police are complete fucking idiots if they think this was the motive. It's quite obvious the objective wasn't theft, it was just to cause damage.
You might be right. But.
It doesn't have to make sense, and you are wrong to dismiss it by projecting your own knowledge on the perps. It is definitely within the realm of possibility that it was metal thieves, this sort of shit happens all the time. In BC we've had metal thieves use trucks to pull up buried wire around radio sites. They'll open lamp posts to steal wire. They'll steal anything that isn't nailed/buried/bolted down and sometimes even that's not enough.
A friend of mine was trying to 'help out' some down on their luck folks and they said 'thank you' by ripping all of the copper out of her rental house. She replaced it all with PVC and they came back and ripped out the walls again expecting there to be copper in there.
Tweekers have an incredibly high level of motivation and a relatively low level of guilt for the things they are willing to do for money
Wherever You Go, There You Are
No redundancies?
Four inch DIAMETER pipe. With piping, the hole goes on the inside.
"just to cause damage."
Or perhaps, to see how much damage it would cause, and how long it would take for the city to recover.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
In these days when grade school kids are handcuffed for "Acts of Terror", a nice ol' bit of vanilla vandalism makes for a pleasant change of pace.
So all those important communication lines went trough a single pipe, with no backup, and that pipe was fully exposed to boot? That's just asking for trouble.
Which doesn't have either an inside or outside diameter of exactly 4".
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RTFA. Pipe was exposed where it crossed a dessert wash. And only a quarter mile from a residential area. Please, put the tinfoil back in the box, and try again.
and WireThatFails by the wire.
And you are down (-4) moderations, if we were keeping score.
If you infer from this example that even smart people are drawn to the superstitious and contrived, then at the very least, your reading comprehension skills are sound.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Why is such an important pipe exposed to the elements?
I wouldn't be surprised if some random jerk got bored, saw a small pipe, and just cut it for laugh.
Dear idiots, the secret is to hide important stuff from plain view, so random jerks don't fuck with your shit. Morons.
FTFS:
"The four-inch-thick pipe, which carries a CenturyLink cable, was found sliced through in an area where it is exposed to the elements as it crosses a desert wash about a quarter of a mile from a residential area."
Moron.
Critically needs the ability to detect threats to itself and call authorities while the perps are at least still in the area. And yes, this would include strapping a bomb to a cable.
Yep, tweekers are pretty much a lost cause.
It's not just copper piping they can steal; they'll also steal electrical wiring. Nothing's too small or low-value for them.
Also, I don't think you can replace copper with PVC; you can use some other stuff, like PEX, but PVC isn't used for high-pressure supply piping as far as I know, at least not inside walls. I have seen it used for irrigation systems though. I think the problem is that you can't use PVC for hot water supply lines.
Meth, not math. Tweakers will steal anything they think they can recycle. I say every one who pisses hot should be summarily executed.
The answer to fixing this problem is to require scrap metal dealers to be licensed (with strong penalties for anyone who isn't) and to require all transactions to be recorded along with the ID of the seller. Its already done in many jurisdictions for pawn shops (where you need a license to operate one and where sellers have to provide ID when they sell it, why should scrap merchants be any different.
That doesn't even make sense. There have got to be a bunch of easier ways to steal metal than going out of your way to find the exposed pipe that just happens to contain out a bunch of important fibre.
These police are complete fucking idiots if they think this was the motive. It's quite obvious the objective wasn't theft, it was just to cause damage.
How do you know if the conduit contains copper wire or fiber until you cut it open?
RTFA. Pipe was exposed where it crossed a dessert wash. And only a quarter mile from a residential area. Please, put the tinfoil back in the box, and try again.
What sort of dessert was it? I like chocolate wash personally.
I think the problem is that you can't use PVC for hot water supply lines.
That's where you use CPVC. It's stronger than straight PVC as well as resistant to higher temperatures. My old house was plumbed in CPVC.
It's generally a tan color as opposed to white for PVC. The GP probably either didn't know or care about the 'minor' difference - it's still PVC. ;)
I don't read AC A human right
> that city is chock full of meth-heads and illegal aliens, both of whom steal any metal they can get their hands on
You must have a real hell of an inner life.
Good point, I just remember seeing something that wasn't metal peeking through the holes in the drywall
Wherever You Go, There You Are
it's people like you that think it's okay for public cops to kill someone for selling loose ciggs
This article shows a lack of redundancy in our internet topology.
"Police said the investigation is in its early stages, but that the pipe may have been vandalized by thieves looking to steal metal."
Naw, it was a botched NSA tapping operation gone wrong link
Is why a single entity shouldn't have a monopoly over all the services in a single area. If there's no competing service to fall back to, everything ends in chaos when it goes down.
Non-white Phonecian here. We are not chock full of illegal aliens.
However we are quite known for our racism.
I work for a major telecom.
These systems *do* have backups and redundancy.
The moment that cable was cut, the system will have started an automated load-shed and re-route at the OC-48 level and above. You'll see messages from the OC-192 trunks shifting to new routes, jumping to spares, and generally trying to route around the damage.
The problem, is that these are OC-192 links. The smaller circuits riding them, such as 10-meg ethernet, OC3, DS3 and DS1 do not get shifted around to available trunks unless they happen to be on the 192 that gets shifted. They're essentially along for the ride.
*IF*...(and that's a very big "if") the smaller circuit is especially critical and vital, then they can TRY to arrange a re-route and stuff it onto one of the alt-routed links. But that takes authorization from people in business suits that fly out to their weekend home in the Hamptons.
So yes. There are backups. If there weren't, this outage would have been international news, and not just a blurb on Slashdot.
[End Of Line]
Probably not related, just throwing this out there:
Going back to 1995, there was a pretty sophisticated deliberate deraliment of a train, including the bridging of the rails with wire to defeate the automatic rail integrity system (bridged disrupted rails with wire, so that the signals automatically sent down the rails would not detect the broken link)
Post OKC attach I distincly remenber this incident
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_Palo_Verde,_Arizona_derailment
Spock? Is that you? I thought you died!
The interest was designed to route around Nuclear bombs, but apparently not copper thieves.
They do that here at the scrap dealer. Name, address, photocopy of your ID, and a thumb print if I am not mistaken. In fact if they don't know you and the amount is for more then some nominal amount (Might be $50) they make you wait three business days before you get your check.
What? You think they consider that some sort of privacy issue? Actually, they do just the opposite. They print out their customer lists and bind them into thick books. Then they "hand out" those customer lists with addresses and phone numbers to telemarketers and other nuisance callers. Want off that published customer list? OK, but it will cost you. Just another way for AT&T to screw their customers.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
would completely cut off an entire region as large as that, shows that whoever is in charge of engineering this stuff simply doesn't understand how the Internet is supposed to work, and has no motivation to ensure it keeps working.
Any pipe carrying traffic for that large an area, should have had multiple alternate/redundant paths - miles away, in different pipes, connecting via different peering points. The Internet is not meant to be a hierarchy or a pyramid - its supposed to be a spiderweb.
Why cable vision is not having redundant path for its traffic? Moreover when fiber cut has happened NOC (network operational centre) would get a loss of signal in 2 seconds. Then the operator needs to deploy field engineers immediately who could have got the info. Are these measures not taken? Now they have to splice the cable to get back the traffic.
Good chance the thieves found out the pipe didn't contain any copper the moment they cut it through. This is supported by the observation that, according to TFS, the pipe was just cut at one place, and nothing had been removed.
I work for an agency that was impacted by this and there some oddities in what is being publicly reported vs what actually was experienced.
The first thing is that this conduit was in a vault with a manhole and it wasn't like this conduit was just sitting out in the open for world+dog to see it.
The next thing here is that CenturyLink does not have a redundant route up to this area and has not had a redundant path during the US West/Qwest/CenturyLink days. A redundant path is slated to come online in the next several months but will initially only serve part of this area although it would in theory bypass a cut like happened in New River this week.
I have experienced three cuts like this with CenturyLink in my over 10 years working in this region so at some point one has to ask what a telco like CenturyLink is doing with the money and taxes collected for services.
In this case the response by CenturyLink for information was severely lacking as it took them several hours to confirm that there was an issue. I'm not talking about calling the general help line here I'm talking about high level managers responsible for major CenturyLink systems here. Now I get that something like this causes chaos but it isn't comforting if high level CenturyLink minion X says something to the effect of 'something is wrong, will let you know when it is fixed, bye'.
Another interesting thing was that this outage took out more than Internet such as dial-tone (local like PRI based and obviously long distance), 911 services (not widely reported but true), cell carriers, local cable companies, etc.
It was pretty obvious that ye olde central office locally is just a digital switching point and the brains for these services are elsewhere. I'm not sure if cell carriers like Sprint, cable companies, etc were using the same fiber conduit or cables or if they have their own cables in the impacted conduit but they definitely took a hit as well during the outage.
Physically there are not backups at this time and quite a few outage maps for CenturyLink showed congestion in Phx, Denver, and Seattle during the cut. I don't know if Denver and Seattle were related to this meaning CenturyLink shuttles traffic up this same route to Vegas, Utah, etc or if these were related to other issues, router meltdowns due to the link being severed, etc.
Socially this was interesting as it had a large financial impact - no ATM, no POS, etc - and really highlights how dependent we have become for digital connections as the backdrop for everyday life.
I don't suspect that this was North Korea, Mexican cartels, etc although one municipality did call out their SWAT team initially as maybe they thought this was the big one, Red Dawn or something like that.
Lastly, I have seen a picture of the cut conduit, again in a vault, and while it is possible that it was metal thieves I'm not sure I buy that as the conduit isn't copper and there are plenty of more lucrative ways to swipe some metal since the length of pipe we are talking about here is fairly small and there is the matter or having the cables in the pipe.
Maybe really dumb criminals (pipe could contain water, electrical, etc, no way to tell by looking at it), dumb criminals who thought this was copper cable in the conduit, or someone trying to make CenturyLink look bad (not a high bar to jump mind you).
No bueno all around and the telcos collectively need to get off their butts and put in properly secured infrastructure with, wait for it, multiple physical paths.
Anonymous here for obvious reasons...
The answer to fixing this problem is to require scrap metal dealers to be licensed (with strong penalties for anyone who isn't) and to require all transactions to be recorded along with the ID of the seller. Its already done in many jurisdictions for pawn shops (where you need a license to operate one and where sellers have to provide ID when they sell it, why should scrap merchants be any different.
They should also have a delay before payout, with appointments required for the time to pick up the money. I imagine that even a one week delay would be enough to allow utilities to track down sales of stolen goods, and then the police can be waiting when the guy shows up to collect.
Stuff like this isn't going to be a problem for anybody legit. Electricians aren't going to trips to the dealer to sell one coil of wire, and be desperate for their $50.
I have been a Cell Tower tech for about 14 years in AZ, with rural areas we have a lot of outages due to copper theft. It is obvious you are from phoenix if you use the term south phoenix. I'm going to disagree the quote "city is chock full of meth-heads and illegal aliens" I agree we have meth heads and illegal aliens: but the illegals for the most part working the shit jobs the tweekers don't take. Better keep an eye out for whitie and crew for the copper thefts. (This is a IT forum, sorry if your trying to push a different message)
Mexican's mad at the Republican's holding up the Presidents amnesty cut the line in protest...
Paul E. Bahre
Or we could, you know, just give them meth. Seriously, this is just more blowback from the failed war on drugs. If would-be tweakers could buy their fix for about the cost of a pack of cigarettes from the local Wal-Mart, they'd quickly wreck or check themselves without having to prostitute or steal. Or, hell, since they've got so much ambition, we could give the meth away but only after the tweaker successfully solved the next in a long series of math problems of gradually increasing complexity. We'd have a bunch of Paul Erdös clones before you know it.
My ex-wife was a tweeker. She hit bottom (repeatedly) and about a decade after we split up she was arrested for identity theft, manufacturing IDs and bank fraud.
She got time and managed to get her probation transferred to a Blue state where her invalid mother lived and she could provide care for her as part of the state welfare system.
Her Blue state probation involved medical and mental health treatment, where they identified her as ADHD and placed her on Ritalin.
She has not relapsed to street drugs in the decade since, maintains a job and a has a stable residence
They essentially traded out an expensive and illegal street drug for an inexpensive and legal pharmaceutical, the outcome in general has been a positive one.
My take away from all this is that red state solutions sound good in the short term (and get asshats elected), but in the long term are generally failures as public policy
btw, AZ (where the copper thefts are occurring) is one of them damn red states
Fiber optic cables are glass in a plastic sheath run through a PVC pipe... other than the connectors, I wasn't aware there was any metal involved. Are the morons stealing metal to buy meth really that stupid? (By this way, this is yet another reason why fiber is superior to cable -- used fiber optic cable has very little resale value, but used copper becomes more precious every day.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
William Shatner? Is that you? I recognize your speaking/punctuation style!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
That would have helped my friends. They had several dozen used bicycles they were shipping to Africa sitting behind the container they were loading. Some idiot came along and threw them in the back of a truck and took off. The police traced them to a metal recycler which paid the guy like $139 and immediately shredded all bicycles, so by the time the police got there, there was nothing to recover. Sigh. Had another meth head that took a hacksaw to a $30,000 bronze statue to sell as scrap for $100. It's depressing that morons are willing to do so much damage for so little gain; I'm sure the people that have had the copper stripped out of their houses feel the same way.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It's depressing that morons are willing to do so much damage for so little gain.
Here is the thing - they're not morons - they're sociopaths. The morons are the rest of us for not making simple legal changes to prevent this nonsense, largely because the beneficiaries of this theft want it to continue.
Inspired by this cry wolfy article by Illuminati seer Dave Hodges, I devised a simple psychological test for paranoid perception of current events, and it was so popular in my own mind I decided to share it.
________
1. Major area of Northern Arizona recently experienced a complete outage of Internet, land-line phone and some cell phones. The fault was traced to a field where someone had dug up a cable and cut partway through it. Why?
A: An idiot with a hacksaw intending to steal copper
B: Covert beta test for implementation of Martial Law
________
2. A call is received by the Fire Department for a cat in tree. They arrive at the correct address and there is a tree but no cat. What has happened?
A: The cat has gathered its courage and climbed down the tree
B: Covert beta test for implementation of Martial Law
________
3. On an evening of gentle breezes, dogs in the neighborhood have begun howling, but there is no moon, siren or train. What is the most likely cause?
A: Female dog in heat
B: Covert beta test for implementation of Martial Law
________
Note on answers and scoring: Congratulations, you did really well!
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>