[Outages-discussion] Level 3 techs, fixing fire damage, cut wrong fiber in London

[Larry Sheldon]

On 5/29/2012 12:07 PM, Frank Bulk wrote:
> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2151535/Thousands-people-left-intern
> et-access-bungling-engineers-cut-wrong-cables.html
>
> Thought this group might find this article interesting.  Was the fiber
> mislabeled or the circuit details incorrectly documented?  We'll probably
> never know.

I am here to tell you that it doesn't make any difference.

A long, long time ago in a place far, far away, after the conversion of 
TWX  to all dial service, Western Electric had a contract to remove 6 o8 
bays of testboard and I don't remember what all.

In preparation for the mining operation, people climbed up into the 
cable racks and hand-over-hand traced each cable to be removed with 
bright orange ribbons.

Then when the mining operation, the alarms and calls started.The Los 
Angeles County Sheriff's telegraph network was destroyed, as were those 
of several stock-brokers houses.

Turns out the orange flags were taken to mean (do not cut)--everything 
else was game.

And since the cut cables were the ones leading from the distribution 
frame to the jack-fields there was no restoration until jumpers could be 
run directly from cable to equipment or equipment to equipment.

Using records, some of which dated back to previous telephone companies.



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