Outage of the year

Wed Sep 3 17:46:53 UTC 1997

Hi,

The following post has more actual operational content than some recent posts,
but mostly this is for general amusement.

We had a T1 tail circuit to a customer fail on Tuesday afternoon. The circuit 
seemed OK, and we were unable to reach the customer by phone.  After a 45 
minute outage or so, the circuit came back up.

Today, the customer called us to explain what had happened.  Seems that a
homeless person set fire to themselves under overhead wiring.  The flames shot
up high enough to ignite the overhead wiring, taking power out to a three
square block area including our customer.  The fire department had to 
extinguish both the flaming homeless person and the overhead wiring.

The customer has been up steadily since.  Status of the homeless individual is
unknown.

Fortunately, the customer called and explained this to our NOC and not the
reverse.  If we'd had to explain this to them, I'd have told the NOC to make
something up.  

This is my nominee for most unusual outage cause of 1997.

Regards,

Bill McCauley
GeoNet Communications