At 08:11 PM 10/12/96 -0500, Sean Donelan wrote:

Stuff happens. No one can predict or plan for everything. But you can have procedures in place to combat the biggest problem in diasasters, poor communication. Partial knowledge about the real situation happens when the real information isn't made available. Techies sometimes get too wrapped up in the hardware, redudant fiber, generators, bomb-resistant shelters; and forget about keeping people informed.

Here's what the latest issue of RISKS Digest [18.52] had to say. - paul [snip] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 13:48:41 -0700 From: "Peter G. Neumann" <Neumann@csl.sri.com> Subject: Rats take down Stanford power and Silicon Valley Internet service Two rats crawled through an underground cable conduit into a cabinet of power switching gear adjacent to the Stanford University cogeneration plant, and caused an explosion that cut off power to the Stanford area beginning around 7:30pm on Thursday evening, 10 Oct 1996, and continuing until 3:30pm Friday afternoon. The BBN Planet hub (Internet Point of Presence, or PoP) at the Stanford University Data Center remained in operation for a few hours on standby battery power, but then gave out around 9pm Thursday; it came back up around 4:30pm, an hour after Stanford restored power. To name just a few, Bay-Area BARNet users at Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, Apple, Sun, Hewlett-Packard, Lawrence Livermore (partially), and SRI were cut off from the Internet. The *Los Angeles Times* and *San Francisco Chronicle* on-line sites were also off the air. Because I had no Internet access yesterday, I held up RISKS-18.52 -- thus enabling me to include this item adding to our RISKS archives collection of rodent-induced outages. (Long-time readers recall that SRI alone has contributed four fresh-fried squirrels resulting in power outages.) [Sources: On-line messages and a front-page *San Francisco Chronicle*, 12 Oct 1996 item] Evidently, the horse is out of the BARNet, and the rats found the weak lynx. They sure put a ro-dent in the day for many BayAreans. Perhaps your mouse will click on a tale of its own. At any rate, this is just one more saga in the weak-link-in-the-infrastructure department. But I'm surprised that power-system technology has not found a way to develop rodent-tolerant circuits. [With SysAdmins and others pacing the halls at SRI waiting for whatever, Doug Moran remarked that keeping around a few fresh-frozen electrofried rodents is allegedly standard practice for purveyors of power; it is then very easy to have a fallback alibi when no other cause can be found.] ------------------------------ [snip]