You say that like you have never been at a telephone switch site that has been hit by lightening. I know you acknowledged that direct hits cause real problems but a M/W tower is the best lightening rod you could ever ask for and they do get hit often. We have a devil of a time restoring from that sometimes. I'll never forget George talking about the giant ball lightening that went charging down the cable run from the M/W Radio room! Or the time the Fiber techs found lightening jumped from the trunk of a tree over to the buried fiber cable and found the single copper strand, provided for the techs to use a butt-set between handholds, which burned like a fuse and crystallized the fiber for several hundred yards. Every time there is a major over build or system installation the grounding engineers arrive on site to check for differences of potential between ground grids and planes.
You are correct that we are hardened, but we still feel an impact from time-to-time.
I was originally trained as a Military Tech Controller so I got the Defense Communications Agency version of EMP effects when we still had vacuum tubes and only the earliest PC's built into test equipment. I have to agree that we wouldn't loose everything, but I think the impact could be a lot worse than you think, simply because we can't know every effect a real EMP might have. But I am much less fearful than the Chicken Littles that think all modern technology will be destroyed.
Hi higgmeister,
It’s been loing time since I was in a switching office, but I was in It and telephony for a long time, and it sounds like your are too.
My point was, as you obviously know, if EMP has an effect, it just cannot take out everything, because there are too many diverse sources of energy and communication in this county, such as the fact the so much of the telephone system is now fiber-optic.
The situations you describe, by the way, are static discharges (which are actually much more powerful than any EMP pulse thus far imagined) and as sever as they are, most communications survives them or reovers rather quickly.
Enjoyed your comments, by the way.
Hank
It’s been a long time since I was in a switching office, though I’ve been in everything from stepping switches, to crossbar, and many digital switching offices. I’ve seen offices of every kind temporarily disabled by lightning strikes, but that is very different from EMP, I think.
Anyway, just wanted to say I appreciated your comments, and understand exactly where you are coming from. EMP is a threat, but I’m with you that it is like almost everything else designed to scare the bajesus out of everyone, way overblown.
Thanks for the interesting comments.
Hank