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Re: [OM] E-5 and engineers...

Subject: Re: [OM] E-5 and engineers...
From: Ken Norton <ken@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2011 09:35:48 -0500
In my "day job", I have to plan for disaster mitigation of our
communications network. There are a couple of vulnerabilities that
I've howled about for 11 years. Obviously, in those 11 years disaster
hasn't happened, but complacency is no solution. I still am bothered
about a particular carrier-hotel that is in a multi-story WOOD
structure building...

Things people in my industry don't/didn't think about:

1. Terrorists flying airliners into multiple buildings--of which the
redundancy/protection was in the other building,

2. Related to the first, power being removed from the building so long
that the batteries in the electronic security locks failed. Power to
the building couldn't be restored until the protected rooms were
inspected, but they couldn't be inspected until power was restored.
Solution was to smash through walls in buildings with questionable
structural integrity. What should have taken only minutes turned into
months.

3. Fires in switch tandem locations which isolate entire cities (Chicago)

4. Power grid collapse. (Quebec and several years later the majority
of the NE USA).

5. Entire communications grid breakdown caused by widespread damage
from hurricanes and earthquakes. Most communications grid systems are
designed on a working-protect basis, not a
working-protect-protect-protect-protect basis.

6. Cascade failure of the communications network caused my too many
people getting new computers and AOL disks for Christmas (1995, 1997
and 1998).

7. A piling in the Chicago River punching a hole in an abandoned
tunnel system that proceeded to flood hundreds and hundreds of
buildings in Chicago where numerous data centers were located in the
basement levels...

How things are all interlinked makes me shudder. Land-line phones not
working? No problem--just use your cell-phone. Oh, wait a second.
Those towers are all connected with land-lines... Of course,
EVERYTHING is leaning on the GPS network now. Think about it--nearly
every form of power, communications and travel depend on GPS for
location AND timing.

But I've been very successful in planning for floods, but all it takes
is a mower or a farmer with a plow to change your plans for the day.
Also, it takes just one packet-storm to ruin a network too. The
problem with disaster planning is the human factor. Over the past ten
years, the vast majority of problems I've been involved with were
caused by humans, not by nature. Especially when human error occurs on
top of another problem. Oops, I didn't mean to shutdown that backup
link while the primary link was already damaged. (Sprint between LA,
Phoenix and Las Vegas)

What happened in Japan this week is a catastrophe of immense human
toll. In some cases (the reactors), the problem is going to get worse
before it stabilizes. But can you plan for something this awful? Not
really. You can't plan--only react. Unfortunately, the ability to
react is dependent upon other things (roads, infrastructure) beyond
your control. We have had state-wide ice-storms wreak havoc because we
couldn't get generators around to all the locations to refresh the
backup-batteries because the roads were impassible and the roads were
impassible because the failed communications network prevented the
highway department from knowing where to run the salt trucks.
Hurricane Katrina was a learning lesson in wide-spread damage to all
forms of infrastructure--of which each one depended on the other for
relief.

I'm reminded that air-travel is safe today because of the airplane
crashes that have led up to today. We DO learn from our mistakes.
Usually. It takes a Three Mile Island and a Chernoble to learn how not
to build nuclear reactors. Add one more nuclear facility to the list
of lessons learned.

AG
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