Check in ...East Coast BLACKOUT

"G.R. Patterson III" writes:



Roy Smith wrote:

Of course, it doesn't always work that way. I remember something like
10-15 years ago, a major long-distance switch in Manhattan went down.

I was working for Bell Communications Research at the time. As I recall, it
was a CEV containing multiplexing and digitizing equipment. A lot of Wall
Street traffic went through there. It did not have its own backup generators,
and, as you stated, someone disabled the alarm after it went off. Normally,
field crews would be sent out with portable generators before shutting the
alarm off, but someone screwed up.

I believe Roy is referring to the ATT toll tandem and DACS. There
is a very bitter irony to the story. ATT had a deal with ConEd to
"load shed" ie if ConEd got overworked, ATT would go to diesel for
short periods to ease the strain. {Many large customers have similar
deals; they get big price breaks for doing so..}

ConEd called, ATT shed load, and later returned to the grid.
BUT..several of their rectifiers ('battery chargers') on that floor
failed to restart. The trouble was, none of the power people were
there -- as they were all at a training session .... for the new
power failure monitoring system...

By the time a power employee got back and heard the alarm, the
batteries were too near exhausting to recover. It took hours to
bring everything back up, during which all three NYC airports were
down since the DACS [an electronic patch panel for leased circuits]
ran all of FAA's circuits.

One result was a crack in the FTS2000 sole-source contract. This
debacle forced OMB to allow FAA to rent some service from others.


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