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CERN Engineers Have To Identify and Disconnect 9,000 Obsolete Cables (vice.com)
An anonymous reader writes: CERN, home to the Large Hadron Collider, has grand plans to update the world's largest particle accelerator complex in the next few years. But engineers have identified a barrier to the upgrade: there's no space for new cables in the injectors that accelerate particles before they enter the LHC. In the past, when parts of the accelerators have been upgraded or added to, engineers would often additionally replace the cables that connected them. In the process, they would leave in place the old cables that were no longer in use. Now, a heap of obsolete cables are blocking the way to install new ones needed for the accelerator’s next big upgrade. To make space, CERN engineers have set out to identify and remove the old, unused cables. All 9,000 of them.
Reading TFA, all these cables are disconnected but still in the trays. It doesn't say if these are copper or fiber, and from that pic it's impossible to tell. If I ever did something like that at any of my corporate cabling jobs I would have been fired pretty quickly. Even at our smallest job we always labeled the cables, even if just with a sharpie. But for copper, a tone generator would make the job far easier. This is basic networking stuff, CERN has some of the smartest people on the planet working there...I expected better from them LOL
It's VERY frightening that a device that could potentially eventually produce a particle that could turn our planet into a blob of stranglets has cabling that looks like that. Perhaps instead of whomever they let do their cabling they should have hired some actual professional cablers, it's not like it costs $$$ to have it done correctly retaliative to the cost of the LHC.