Less than 24 hours after I posted my previous post on the frailty of utility infrastructures, the next day at around 9am a regional electrical substation in Chilliwack went up in flames. They had to shut down power across the city and everything was down until about 3:30pm today.
Another single point of failure, although this one was kind of obvious.
Earlier today, a single building goes to flames in Chilliwack (specifically in the Yarrow community). Apparently this building was close to some fibre optic cables, and as a result TELUS customers received some outages with wireless and internet service. There was also some collateral damage done to Shaw customers. For example, ping times to anywhere outside the city was about 200ms, with about 10% packet loss. Bandwidth is at about 5kB/s, which makes things feel like to good old days when you used to use the internet through a 33.6k dial-up modem connection.
So a whole city’s internet infrastructure gets shredded to bits because a building caught on fire – a single point of failure.
I also remember quite a few years ago when I was still a student at UBC that a bus crashed on a power line somewhere in Vancouver and the net result was that it brought down power across the entire university endowment land area.
This leads me to the question of: how many other significant points of failure exist in our infrastructure do we have? I bet the answer to this is much more than we imagine, for power, telecommunications and water/sewage.