One of those newfangled telephones?
Power, internet access knackered in London after exploding kit burps fire into capital's streets
Some of the UK's ISPs may want to rethink their routing schemes after a massive fire near Holborn tube station in London knocked out power and internet access across several regions of the capital. There are now around 70 firefighters at the #Holbornfire no reports of injuries and local offices have been evacuated pic.twitter …
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 18:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
How can people log in to El Reg forums if their internet is down, eh?
Well they wouldn't know the story is happening to comment if they did not have another way to go online.
Ever hear of browsing using your phone? wifi?
good god these people don't ever think before commenting, and they are supposed to be techies?
hope you never work in my building
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 22:17 GMT Destroy All Monsters
There goes the cloud, in the shape of belching smoke
Ever hear of browsing using your phone? wifi?
I hate to break it to you, but these systems actually use cabling to bring the data to whatever exchange point it needs to go to.
hope you never work in my building
Is that the one where unicorns magically radiate data to the destinations, powered by bionic carrots up their arses?
Go to bed, PHB!
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Thursday 2nd April 2015 11:59 GMT The Vociferous Time Waster
Re: How can people log in to El Reg forums if their internet is down, eh?
"Ever heard of browsing using your phone? Wifi?"
Ah, the pseudo techie.
I suppose you think those technologies work through magic and done have wired backhaul over the very same wired infrastrucure.
Go back to your html 'coding', mate.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 20:06 GMT a cynic writes...
We just went home...
We lost the fibre (and SIP trunks) to begin with. The power went sometime later.
We've already been warned that the fibre is likely to be down over 24 hours, so if we do have power in the morning then I get to finish off reconfiguring the firewall to use the old ADSL set up. If not then it's VPN direct to the data centre for our key people and I can kiss goodbye to taking next week off.
Joy...
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 21:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
Power circuits are currently be reconnected to bloody huge generators. Looks like this could be a long outage.
From UKPN:
Update at 19:13 - Our engineers are continuing to work with emergency services to tackle a fire in a tunnel in the Kingsway area. At this stage our plan will be to restore the majority of customers by using several large generators. However due to the severity of the fire and the developing situation it is unlikely that power will be restored tonight. We apologise for the impact this will have, we'll work to restore power as quickly as is safely possible.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 21:24 GMT x 7
Oh shit........presumably its cables in the WWII Chancery lane Citadel - which for a while held the Kingsway phone exchange. There are miles of tunnels down there. Putting it out is going to be really difficult - theres (apparently) now only one access and simply just reaching the underground tunnels is going to be hard.
Theres a risk the fire could leak through into the tube as well if it can break through the sealed passageways.
Potentially this is a nightmare for the fire crews which could run for days
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Thursday 2nd April 2015 09:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
The former Kingsway exchange isn't near the road of the same name, it was apparently named deliberately to sow some seeds of confusion during wartime. The tunnel network doesn't carry power cables.
There is however a tunnel under Kingsway that does carry power cables - the old Kingsway tramway tunnel. Lots of work going on in there for Crossrail too.
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Thursday 2nd April 2015 10:49 GMT x 7
from what I've seen of the various films / photos the fire looks too far north to be in the tram tunnel?
There once was a plan for a Crossrail route which used both the tram tunnel and the Chancellory Lane shelter tubes - it would have been an interesting bit of tunneling to join the two. 90% bend and 100 feet difference in depth to negotiate in around half a mile, constrained by the buildings along the route
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 22:55 GMT x 7
checking online maps, the fire was apparently first reported at the "Upper Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber" in 15-25 Breams Buildings - which backs onto Took Street, site of one of the citadel access shafts (now capped over). Fire fighting in closed tunnels - not good. It took days to put out the similar underground Guardian exchange / citadel fire in Manchester ten years ago
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Thursday 2nd April 2015 20:40 GMT Tom 13
Re: It took days to put out the similar underground
On the bright side, that's much better than the Centralia, PA fire. That one started in 1962 and they think it might last another 250 years.
But seriously, I hope everyone is okay. I know these are the kinds of fires where despite the best training and efforts some of the front line guys always seem to get injured.
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Thursday 2nd April 2015 00:24 GMT Me19713
I work for a power utility in the US (37 years and counting). We ran a lot of fiber in unused power and gas lines in urban areas. Early one morning the substation operators were busy re-energizing some manholes after a fiber-pulling session.
We had a phase-to-phase fault (34 KV, IIRC). A 36" manhole cover was blown into the 4th floor windows of one of the local banks. No one was hurt, but the fireball and falling debris tore up a few cars. And there were more than a few broken windows (and dirty shorts).
That certainly broke the monotony.
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Thursday 2nd April 2015 12:21 GMT Jellied Eel
That's one of the things that put me off working in telcomms for a power company. And seeing a report from a field engineer cancelling a request for a TDR team to shoot a fibre fault. He didn't need it, he could see the cable ends in the crater. Oil-filled HV cable had a bad day and made quite a bang.