Who would that surprise?
I suspect that it was probably an Islamofascist dry run to practice for doing just that.
ping
Probe.
The cable that is the backbone for my ISP is simply running along the ceiling of a Baltimore train tunnel, along with a lot of other “important” cables and wires.
Several years ago, they had a wreck with fire in the tunnel and it took about 4 days to fix the cable.
You wouldn’t even have to strain your back by lifting a heavy manhole cover to get to it.
Actually, the issues go well beyond communications.
Most Americans have forgotten that there is an inherent conflict between efficiency and robustness.
For instance, most companies today maintain little in the way of inventory. Just in time delivery and overnight shipment of parts means the space and money previously invested in stock can be used for other purposes. This is great for efficiency, but it means that most factories and businesses are going to find themselves shut down within a day or two if the supply lines are disrupted for any reason. The system is efficient but not at all robust.
The other end of the scale is the military. Our entire military, with its immense cost, can be considered a standby system that’s maintained even when it’s not being used to kill people and break things. It is highly inefficient but equally robust.
Isn’t calling them “Manholes” sexist? s/
.
Another Katrina event without the flooding....theft, mayhem, looting, rioting, murder, etc.
Related:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2236224/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2225987/posts
The cable cuts were actually in San Jose and San Carlos. The area effected was around Morgan hill.
The most likely perpetrators are members of the CWA who are in contract negotiations with AT&T at this time.
There was an NCIS episode like this.
My son who lives in Troy, NY called me earlier this morning to tell me that his Time Warner phone and Road Runner are not functioning. The TV cable is fine. When trying to call, he gets a message to please call back because they are getting too many calls. I live 90 miles west of him in Rome, NY. I have Time Warner, and am having the same problem, although my digital phone and cable are working. I can even access my email through my mail program. However, I cannot get Google, Matt Drudge or several other sites to load. I get a message that they cannot local the server. FreeRepublic however is working fine. When I try calling Time Warner, I get an “all circuits are busy” message. Is anyone else experiencing any problems? I did a search on FR and couldn’t find threads on it.
I assumed this was the local telephone workers union giving everyone a wake-up call.
As an example, when a low-income area has people breaking into transformers and causing tens of thousands of dollars of damage and environmental cleanup requirements all for a few cents of copper wiring, it should be a wakeup call to what vulnerabilities there are in many of our systems. Instead, costs just gets budgeted in and passed on to the consumer in their electric bills, and everyone goes on their merry way. Reporting vulnerabilities has not done much actual good even under the Bush Administration, which seemed more interested in registering citizens and collecting their biometric data than protecting our country.
This article hints at far more serious threats than most (nearly all) people realize.
“over dependence on centralized services.”
That pretty well sums everything up. That’s why, as Hayek showed, socialism never works. It shows why transportation is the Achilles heel of globalization. It shows why a truly Federal system is the best form of government. Subsidiarity works; centralization breaks down.
A larger city will have more redundancy in the system and you’ll need to cut more than 8 cables to cut it off. And of course even if you do there needs to be something along with it. We’ve had blackouts that more thoroughly shutdown larger chunks of real estate and things by and large turned out OK.
In the entire 200-plus page book on emergencies put out by FEMA (Are you ready? http://www.fema.gov/pdf/areyouready/areyouready_full.pdf ) there are two astonishing weaknesses:
It never so much as mentions ham radio,
and it never so much as mentions gun ownership.
ping