Canada Fiber Cut?

Greg A. Woods woods at most.weird.com
Fri Jul 16 16:44:41 UTC 1999


[ On Friday, July 16, 1999 at 12:22:42 (-0400), Majdi Abbas wrote: ]
> Subject: Canada Fiber Cut?
>
> 	So far I've got a downed PVC to Toronto, and a total inability
> to call many numbers in the Toronto area (I get a reorder)...this appears
> to be a widepsread outage...has anyone heard anything?
> 
> 	Started at 10:23 EDT.

Not a fibre cut -- an electrical explosion and subsequent fire in the
Bell Canada Simcoe St. switch building in downtown Toronto cut power to
the switch at about 7:30EDT or so.  Shortly after the fire was squelched
the batteries gave out and half of downtown Toronto lost all telephone
and data service.  One electrician has been sent to hospital suffering
from smoke inhalation.  The fire department reports it as a three-alarm
fire.  Supposedly it was on the fourth floor of the building and the
fire went all the way up to the ninth floor before it was put out.  I'm
not sure how tall the building is in total -- perhaps 12 floors -- and
it's all Bell Canada switching equipment.

Everyone in downtown Toronto no doubt knows about it by now, but of
course they can't tell anyone -- even the downtown cellular systems are
either out-of-service because of dead land-lines, or are too overloaded
by folks phoning their friends and families....

My ISP is located downtown, but they have dual-redunant connections to
their North York datacentre, which happens to be where my ISDN line
terminates so I'm still online! ;-)  (though there was a short ISDN
interruption as the Bell systems routed around the dead Simcoe switch)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods at acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>




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