http://www.cleveland.com/news/sreports/flood A 36" pipe burst yesterday afternoon, releasing over 25 gallons of water into an area covering several city blocks. As luck would have it, my office building (the Superior Building) sits right in front of the place where the pipe burst. I was down there last night and again tonight, and it's a *mess*. East 9th Street, downtown Cleveland's main north-south thoroughfare, remains closed between St. Clair and Superior avenues. There was a huge sinkhole last night... the entire financial district looked like a war zone, and it looked like someone dropped a bomb on 9th Street. At 9th and Rockwell, several services are completely down. Ameritech has fiber in this area, as does MCI Worldcom. MCI Worldcom and CLEC NextLink Ohio both have facilities in the Superior Building. NextLink's Cleveland CO, in fact, is on the second floor. They seem to have weathered the crisis pretty well. I don't know about Worldcom. Quite frankly, I don't do business with them, and I'm not sure whether they provide dialtone, data services or some other services out of the Superior Building, as I've not had the opportunity to talk to anyone up there. Ameritech Voice Mail was broken earlier. It's still not quite working correctly. I just verified this by dialing my home phone number. Since I'm dialing FROM my home phone line, I should get my custom greeting immediately, because the line's busy. Instead, I have to wait four rings and then I get the default message. WRT ISP's: The biggest ISP in the Superior Building is NACS.NET (my upstream). Multiverse, another largish local ISP, is here too, but their dialups and servers are colocated at Verio. Verio, along with a slew of other ISP's, has offices at Playhouse Square that were not affected by the flooding. Obviously, I'm also located in the SB, and I know of one other small service provider that runs his servers and dialups out of the same building (the office next to me, in fact). I don't know about him, but NACS appears to be doing fine. They're running off several generators. I brought my two servers downstairs and hooked them up to their generators, so I'm back up too. It looks like the impact on connectivity should be pretty minimal. Power, however, isn't expected to go back on before the end of the day tomorrow. Also, they had to cut a gas line to get down to the water main. (RELAX... they turned off the gas first! NO BACKHOES, I repeat, NO BACKHOES were involved in this incident!) One of the talking heads on the eleven o'clock news said the water main could be fixed as early as 1AM EST (forty-five minutes from now). -- North Shore Technologies http://NorthShoreTechnologies.net 888.480.4NET Steve Sobol, President, Chief Website Architect and Janitor sjsobol@NorthShoreTechnologies.net My opinions DO, in fact, represent the official opinions of North Shore Technologies Corporation, since I own the company. Thanks for asking.