DHS letters for fuel and facility access

Tue Mar 17 17:08:15 UTC 2020

On Tue, Mar 17, 2020 at 12:44 PM Paul Nash <paul at nashnetworks.ca> wrote:
>
> September 2001.  Just after the 9/11 attacks, all of lower Manhattan was shut down.  Out link (IIRC) was to a satellite farm on Staten island, across the bay to 60 Hudson.  Power went off, diesels kicked in, fuel trucks was not allowed in, and a few days later we lost all international connectivity.

We had some interesting failures during 9/11 as well -- for some
reason, the UPS didn't kick in, so everything went down - and then
came back a few minutes later as the generators came online -- and
then went down again ~2 hours later -- turns out that the genset air
filters got clogged with dust, and suffocated the diesel.
This was "fixed" a few days later by brushing them off with brooms and
paintbrushes -- by this point they had completely discharged the 24V
starter batteries, and so someone (not me!) had to lug a pair of car
batteries and jumper cables. They restarted, and ran for a while, and
then stopped again.

It turns out that getting a permit to store lots of diesel on the roof
is hard (fair enough), and so there was only a small holding tank on
the roof, and the primary tanks were in the basement -- and the
transfer pump from the basement to roof storage was not, as we had
been told, on generator power....

We had specified that the transfer pump be on the generator feed,
there was a schematic showing at is being on the generator feed, there
was even a breaker with a cable marked  "Transfer Pump (HP4,5)" ---
but it turned out to just be a ~3ft piece of cable stuffed into a
conduit, and not actually, you know, running all the way down to the
basement and connected to the transfer pump.

W

>
> Lots of important people lost power as well, so the feds decided to let the diesel tankers in after a few days’ deliberations.
>
>         paul
>
> > On Mar 17, 2020, at 11:21 AM, Mark Tinka <mark.tinka at seacom.mu> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > On 17/Mar/20 17:15, Paul Nash wrote:
> >
> >> That same fuel shortage killed all Internet traffic to sub-Saharan Africa.  Took us a while to figure out what was wrong with the satellite link to the US.
> >
> > What year was that :-)?
> >
> > Mark.
>

-- 
I don't think the execution is relevant when it was obviously a bad
idea in the first place.
This is like putting rabid weasels in your pants, and later expressing
regret at having chosen those particular rabid weasels and that pair
of pants.
   ---maf