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What was "the incident" at your work place?
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this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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I was supervising filling in a pit we had dug on the edge of a forest. We had dump trucks coming in dumping gravel. One particular driver wasn't great at his job and there had been issues with him in the past.
That driver came in and dumped his gravel, but then he drove off with his bed still raised and almost immediately smashed into electric lines that ran off into the forest. One telephone pole even snapped at the base and fell over.
Within 30 seconds multiple cops came speeding onto the job site. It turns out those electric lines ran to a radio tower in the woods that ran the police radio. The idiot in the dump truck had taken out the police comms for the whole town.
Note: if you're planning a crime in that town, you only have to cut one wire to disable all police communication.
That's some lacking infrastructure
I knew some people who would in a small jurisdiction have a friend go far from where they were doing crimes and light off a bunch of pop-pop-pop fireworks to draw police attention away from the less attention grabbing thing they were doing
Allegedly
This is why we shld bury our lines, much more effort to dig down six feet than get a ladder and snip
A wild backhoe appears!
It used Dig! It's Super Effective!
What does a network engineer bring on a hiking trip in the woods? Water, snacks, extra sunscreen, a first aid kit, bug repellent, bear spray ... and a folding shovel and a piece of fiber-optic cable.
(What's the fiber for?)
Well, if you get lost in the woods or need to be rescued, you take the shovel, dig a trench, put the fiber in it, bury it ... and within an hour, someone with a backhoe will show up to tear it up. Then you can just follow the backhoe tracks back to civilization.
And this is how a micro quake severed our T1 line from LA to Phoenix and shut the network down in our office for a week.
Honestly never thought of that, sounds like there would need to be some sort of protective channeling, with space to allow some shifting
Buried lines of all kinds are frequently severed by excavators because their position isn’t properly or fully documented.
The best set up I ever saw was a sewer tunnel, almost 12 feet tall, that handled all the services. From sewage to water to electricity to data; it held everything and was trivial to maintain and run new lines in.
line sounds like a really interesting idea, although I feel like documenting where you put things should be a basic task. Probably why it's not done properly
Or use mobile phone networks.
You'd be surprised, how fragile critical infrastructure often is. There was an incident in Europe a few years ago, where a single miscalculation in a planned power line shutdown almost caused the entire European grid to split.
It slowed down a bit, and then we quickly learned that maintaining the perfect 50hz wasn't actually necessary anymore. Few people still have clocks that depend on it
I'm not talking about the incident in Romania, but in Germany.
A shipyard needed some wires over a river deactivated and that caused an overload cascade, because the river was the border between two providers who had different assumptions about the capacity of the power lines connecting them.
oh damn, ain't something. I will be looking into that, thank you!
Clocks, true.
Computer systems in general, however, will start acting very squirrelly outside of an approved MHz range. Wall warts and power supplies can handle only so much deviation from the norm. It’s why high-end UPS systems do power conditioning to provide a pure sine wave.
No worries we're talking like 49.9995 hz
They probably had plenty of infrastructure for normal operations.
What they were lacking was a BCDR plan.
...which includes having backup lines or a more robust installation. Police officers aren't engineers or system administrators for public infrastructure.
You're right tho, a backup alone would not be sufficient
Couldn’t they sell a few of their spare MRAPs to buy a backup generator and a redundant microwave link? Sheesh.