East Coast Earthquake 8-23-2011

Patrick W. Gilmore patrick at ianai.net
Fri Aug 26 15:38:03 UTC 2011


On Aug 24, 2011, at 12:41 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
>> From: "Patrick W. Gilmore" <patrick at ianai.net>
> 
>> On Aug 24, 2011, at 8:55 AM, JC Dill wrote:
>>> On 23/08/11 3:13 PM, William Herrin wrote:
>>>> A. Our structures aren't built to seismic zone standards. Our
>>>> construction workers aren't familiar with*how* to build to seismic
>>>> zone standards. We don't secure equipment inside our buildings to
>>>> seismic zone standards.
>>> 
>>> They should be.
>>> They should be.
>>> You should.
>>> 
>>> Earthquakes can happen anywhere. There's no excuse to fail to
>>> build/secure to earthquake standards.
>> 
>> Tornados can happen anywhere, there's no excuse to fail to
>> build/secure for tornados.
>> 
>> [Etc.]
>> 
>> Things that cost money are not done unless the probability of the
>> danger is higher than vanishingly small. This temblor - at 5.8 with no
>> injuries or fatalities - was the largest earthquake on the entire east
>> coast in 67 years, and the largest in VA in well over a century. Think
>> of the _trillions_ of dollars which could have been put into
>> healthcare, public safety, hell, better networking equipment :) we
>> could have used instead of making all buildings on the east coast
>> earthquake safe.
> 
> False economy.  That argument was valid *before* the Internet became a 
> Generally Mission Critical Utility.  It is now.  And, alas, commerce being
> what it is, it's not deployed to be *nearly* as failover redundant as it
> was designed to be,[1]

The original quote was not limited buildings which house Internet infrastructure.

As for whether it is true for "Internet", I would argue the point, but ain't got the time.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick





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