[AusNOG] Warrnambool exchange

[Ramsay, Paul]

I remember back in the old country working for the national carrier we had a Siemens DLU containerised exchange catch on fire. The fire brigade extinguished the fire but the equipment and MDF were damaged by sticky black soot. 
The fire happened on Friday afternoon, another containerised exchange was bought on-site the next day and all 2000 copper voice services were restored by late Monday/early Tuesday. There were teams of cable jointers and techs running reterminating UG cables and jumpering on the new MDF while working in continuos shifts. Forensics said the fire was caused by a possible spark from an air conditioner landing in a cardboard box on the floor but was never really proved. This happened about 15 years ago and to this day I still have a phobia about any cardboard boxes stored in equipment rooms.
The other thing I learned that day is if you want meet with the top management a disaster like this brings them to you. I understand this stressful situation and hope that the Warnambool exchange gets fixed quickly and that any lessons learned are shared and acted on to help mitigate future risk.

On 28/11/2012, at 7:30 PM, "Paul Brooks" <pbrooks-ausnog at layer10.com.au> wrote:

> On 28/11/2012 5:12 PM, Joshua D'Alton wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> Honestly I don't find much fault except that it took them more than 24 hours to move
>> in any emergency gear. I don't think that is acceptable really.
> 
> Typically the fire dept control when permission can be granted for people to access
> the building, once safety inspections and forensic examination has been completed. It
> can often take a lot more than 24 hours for emergency services to allow access.
> 
> For a better response time than this you would need to move the emergency gear in to a
> nearby location outside the building, and patch it into the external cables via
> manholes outside the building. In this case that would have involved cutting through
> perfectly good copper and fibre main cables, as the MDF wasn't actually damaged beyond
> a bit of smoke and soot. Reterminating tens of thousands of copper pairs after cutting
> through the main cables with an angle-grinder in the outside pit would have taken a
> bit longer than 24 hours, I expect.
> 
> Much easier to call 'force majeure'.
> 
> P.
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