[ On Friday, July 16, 1999 at 12:22:42 (-0400), Majdi Abbas wrote: ]
Subject: Canada Fiber Cut?
So far I've got a downed PVC to Toronto, and a total inability to call many numbers in the Toronto area (I get a reorder)...this appears to be a widepsread outage...has anyone heard anything?
Started at 10:23 EDT.
Not a fibre cut -- an electrical explosion and subsequent fire in the Bell Canada Simcoe St. switch building in downtown Toronto cut power to the switch at about 7:30EDT or so. Shortly after the fire was squelched the batteries gave out and half of downtown Toronto lost all telephone and data service. One electrician has been sent to hospital suffering from smoke inhalation. The fire department reports it as a three-alarm fire. Supposedly it was on the fourth floor of the building and the fire went all the way up to the ninth floor before it was put out. I'm not sure how tall the building is in total -- perhaps 12 floors -- and it's all Bell Canada switching equipment. Everyone in downtown Toronto no doubt knows about it by now, but of course they can't tell anyone -- even the downtown cellular systems are either out-of-service because of dead land-lines, or are too overloaded by folks phoning their friends and families.... My ISP is located downtown, but they have dual-redunant connections to their North York datacentre, which happens to be where my ISDN line terminates so I'm still online! ;-) (though there was a short ISDN interruption as the Bell systems routed around the dead Simcoe switch) -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098 VE3TCP <gwoods@acm.org> <robohack!woods> Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>