Major UK Comms Backbone Bunker Burned Out 309
evilandi writes "The BBC are reporting that much of Manchester, England is without telephone service following a fire in a major underground tunnel system. The site in question is strongly suspected to be the 'Guardian' nuclear communications bunker system which is one of the main three UK subterranean communications backbone bunkers. The giveaway is this regional BBC news story which mentions Chapel Street, one of the very few entrance/exit points to the 'Guardian' system. If confirmed, Manchester could be without wired communications for some time. The MANAP Manchester Network Access Point regional Internet hub is officially reporting nothing, but a number of UK admins are seeing significant disruption."
Strange (Score:4, Funny)
Use protection! (Score:5, Funny)
The government(s) want you to believe that it is merely a coincidence. Coincidentally, I'm currently offering virtual tinfoil hats at a 20% discount. Therein lies the difference between a fortunate and unfortunate coincidence!
Re:Use protection! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Use protection! (Score:4, Funny)
However, I do not wish to be seen as the 800 pound ogre in this market, so I am now offering licenses for my IP to all Scoria customers at the low rate of $699.00 per brain.
Act now to avoid future legal liabilities.
Re:Use protection! (Score:5, Funny)
I take it there are significant discounts for SCO & RIAA directors, then?
Re:Strange (Score:3, Funny)
It's not. This is an obvious Al Qaeda attack against the free world's communications infrastructure. We need to invade Iran NOW and capture the terrorists operating out of there before it gets worse. Today it's wired telephone service, tomorrow millions of Finnish teenagers could be without cellular phone service. We must all band together to stop the terrorists.
Re:Strange (Score:5, Funny)
Who authored this message, Bush or Dick?
Re:Strange (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Strange (Score:4, Informative)
Obvious Pun (Score:5, Funny)
Can you hear me now???? (Score:5, Funny)
Manchester Unplugged (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how british Amatuer Radio is doing.
About ten years ago we had a fire in an electrical cage under the computer room. Large stacks of cable had been laying about in the cage, where some brilliant person decided to pile several boxes of paper, too. Sparks from construction work smoldered in the paper and, despite the cable insullation being fire resistant, with enough heat it burns like petrol. Black soot settled everywhere, as smoke went into the ventillation system and all but one workstation were out (somehow the powermains and one line failed to short out) We were in during the weekend and laid enough cable to bring up basic services by the following Monday, but inhaled unknown quantities of asbestos and compounds released from the burnt plastic and rubber.
In the end the failure of fire alarms was blamed on the fire, too, but the firemarshall found the wires for it (which are supposed to survive fire) had been disconnected for years.
It'll be interesting to see how this all came about.
Re:Manchester Unplugged (Score:2)
Sorry, this one is irresistable:
Looks like someone DID carry coals to Manchester!
Re:Manchester Unplugged (Score:2)
Nah, sorry (again)
I remembered in wrong :P
Re:Manchester Unplugged (Score:3, Insightful)
Since when does rubber and plastic contain asbestos?
Re:Manchester Unplugged (Score:5, Informative)
Asbestos isn't manufactured, it's mined: it's a fibrous mineral and totally combustion-proof. It's wholly impossible for asbestos to result from burning wire jacket unless the asbestos was there to begin with. Unless the building has very old, very illegal electrical wiring, there was no asbestos. Now, it is possible that there was some asbestos insulation in the cable ducting that went unnoticed and he meant "we inhaled unknown quantities of: (asbestos) and (crap from burning wire insulation)".
Re:Manchester Unplugged (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Manchester Unplugged (Score:2)
Fortunately the were mostly off when the fire happened. No guarrantee of that sort of luck these days as people seem to think it's fine to leave one running with a screen saver on. After all, it's not really on, right?
Manchester... (Score:2, Informative)
Northeners (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Northeners (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Northeners (Score:4, Funny)
It's kind of like what the US does with reference to anyone from the Deep South..
Re:Northeners (Score:3, Informative)
Get your stereotypes right! Otherwise it's like saying that people from Maine are well-known as "red-necks".
Re:Northeners (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Northeners (Score:3, Funny)
*ahem*
Re:Northeners (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing Improves Infrastructure Like Disaster (Score:2, Insightful)
Probably a safe bet that all the copper that they had down there will go, replaced by glass. Left to their own devices, whomever was owner of the communications cables down there was regularly trying to get just a little bit more out of copper and resisting the expense of going to fibre. The hurdle has now been cleared to replace it as quick as they can, which will be fastest to put
Actually... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Northeners (Score:3, Informative)
On the other hand, there's 2000 people in Moss Side with AK-47s.
Oy, i just bought a house in Moss Side... stop dissin the neighbourhood. I bet at tops there's only 20 ppl with AK's, don't exagerate :)
Seriously though i'd not be too worried about walking through Moss Side at night, I think places like Totenham are a lot more scary.
Mirror: Cold-War History in Manchester (Score:5, Interesting)
Posting anonymously to avoid karma whoring. No troll text, I promise!
- - - - -
Cold-War History in Manchester
The Guardian Underground Telephone Exchange
Ever since I moved to Manchester in 1986 I've heard rumours about secret underground installations under the city centre. I particularly remember being told on several occasions about a secret nuclear bunker under Piccadilly Gardens. I have since found out that there is some truth behind these rumours. This web site reports my findings.
Warning
The Guardian Underground Telephone Exchange is NOT open to the public. Attempting to gain unauthorised access is trespass. Often it is very dangerous too: on more than one occasion people have died in the process of trying to gain access to such sites.
If you attempt to enter a defence related site, even an apparently unused one, you should expect an unpleasant encounter with military police.
Please do not pester site owners to gain access, this causes irritation to many of them.
Instead, please join one of the specialist societies that can organise visits properly.
Most of what I found out came from the excellent and highly recommended book:
War Plan UK: The Secret Truth about Britain's "Civil Defence"
by [http://www.gn.apc.org/duncan/]Duncan Campbell
Published by Paladin Books in 1983
(Unfortunately it is now out of print)
This book includes a map and description of the Guardian Underground Telephone Exchange and deep level tunnel system in Manchester. Duncan Campbell has kindly given me permission to reproduce this information here:
I have had to remove the map at the request of the Geographers' A-Z Map Co Ltd.
Manchester Guardian is an underground telephone exchange in the centre of Manchester built in 1954. It is 112 feet (34m) below ground and cost 4 million to construct. The main tunnel, one thousand feet long and twenty-five feet wide (300m by 7m), lies below buildings in Back George Street, linking up to an anonymous and unmarked surface building containing the entrance lifts and ventilator shafts. There are also access shafts in the Rutherford telephone exchange in George Street.
Its purpose was to resist a Hiroshima sized twenty-kiloton atom bomb, and preserve essential communications links even if the centre of Manchester had been flattened.
A deep level tunnel system runs east and west from Guardian. A mile-long (1.3km) tunnel runs west to Salford, and a thousand-yard (700m) tunnel runs to Lockton Close in Ardwick, where a modernised ventilator building marks the south-eastern extension of the Manchester deep level tunnels.
In the event of an attack warning, Guardian's main entry shaft was to have been sealed by a thirty-five-ton concrete slab that could be positioned over the entrance. Staff could escape either by using built-in hydraulic jacks to lift the slab (if covered with debris) some weeks after attack, or via the deep level tunnels to Ardwick and Salford. Emergency stores contained six weeks' supply of food rations, and Guardian had its own artesian well, generators, fuel tanks, and artificial windows and scenery painted onto rest-room walls.
The exchange was to survive even if the city it served was destroyed.
The Manchester Guardian telephone exchange and deep level tunnels were one of several such systems built in the 50s. Similar installations can be found under London (Kingsway) and [http://www.birminghamanchor.co.uk/]Birmingham (Anchor).
By the time the exchange and tunnels were complete they were entirely vulnerable to more powerful Soviet H-bombs.
I decided to try to locate and photograph the shafts and surface buildings described in "War Plan UK". To my surprise I found the surface buildings still intact, although they seemed to be in a bad state of repair. Their existence is still not common knowledge in Manchester.
I wonder how much is left of the underground installations.
Ard
Duncan Campbell's other project - Echelon (Score:5, Informative)
Mirror: Reply to the site from BT Manchester (Score:5, Interesting)
- - - - -
Cold-War History in Manchester
The Guardian Underground Telephone Exchange
REPLY TO THE SITE FROM BT MANCHESTER
For general info having scanned through your site:
1. The exchange is still used as a secure cable route -avoids digging up the city.
2. It is over 200' deep and is unaffected by foundations etc.
3. All equipment is largely intact except for the telephone exchange elements which were removed to comply with EEC legislation regarding some of their components (about 3 years ago)
4. "was particularly surprised to see the piano and pool table in the recreation room. They were planning to have quite a relaxing time sitting out Armageddon down there!"
Don't forget we had Power Engineers working down there until 1997 -this was their rest room!
5. "The people of Manchester paid a great deal of money for the construction of this bunker, they were given no choice in the matter, it was built without their knowledge and it was obsolete before it was completed, for these reasons I believe we should be given access to it!"
In actual fact I believe that it wasn't paid for by the British Government let alone Manchester - it was largely paid for by NATO which in those days meant America. Since then it has been maintained at the Post Office/BT's expense
BT are unable to open the site to the public for a variety of reasons mainly concerning safety and security.
26 August 1999
If anyone reading this has any more information on the underground installations in Manchester please email me at: atomic!cybertrn.demon.co.uk
Copyright 2000 (C) George Coney
Last updated 24 January 2000
Not everyone will notice (Score:5, Funny)
...and they were so close to figuring out how to use internet...
Man! (Score:3, Funny)
I almost beat him and BLAMMO the connection dies! ARG!!!
hehehe
*snort* (Score:2)
BWAHAHAHAHAAAAA!
*sniff* *wipes tear*
Man, oh man....
You owe me one bowl of cheerios, you insensitive clod.
yay (Score:2, Funny)
just kidding--i love you guys. hope this gets fixed soon!
London is unaffected (Score:5, Interesting)
Simon
Re:London is unaffected (Score:2, Interesting)
It's the other side of the country (Score:3, Informative)
Not even close to most of the city (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not even close to most of the city (Score:5, Informative)
We've got patchy and intermittant ISDN connectivity to our Manchester office, but we're not expecting anything close to even a normal backup service for days. We've shunted work out to other regional offices to cover.
OK, it's bad, but worse things have happened. Remember when the IRA blew Manchester city centre up? No lives have been lost and everything will be back to normal soon. ish.
Re:Not even close to most of the city (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not even close to most of the city (Score:2, Informative)
Ping? *sizzle* (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ping? *sizzle* (Score:2)
Re:Ping? *sizzle* (Score:3, Informative)
...which used to be named 'The Manchester Guardian' [guardian.co.uk] (which you probably already knew, I just couldn't resist pointing it out). Of course, its offices are in London now, which spoils the original joke somewhat.
Funniest line of the article (Score:5, Funny)
"People experiencing problems with their telephones were also asked not to report the fault."
Too bad they told them to wait. I can see it now, thousands of people screaming in the general direction of the phone company's office. A modern day, less funny, Monty Python sketch waiting to happen.air in the tunnels? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:air in the tunnels? (Score:5, Funny)
We keep sending guys to check on that, but they never come back...
Re:air in the tunnels? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:air in the tunnels? (Score:3, Informative)
Assuming they ever were air tight. Typically bunkers would operate under positive preasure, so that air would exit through any cracks, as opposed to fallout entering.
Re:air in the tunnels? (Score:3, Funny)
This could never happend in France (Score:4, Funny)
'secret cold war tunnel' (Score:5, Informative)
All this was accompanied by some very Dr Strangelove images of corrugated tunnels and antiquated switchgear, a smooth man from British Telecom (who seemed very calm for someone whose secret underground nuclear bunker was on fire) and the sad beeping of disconnected call centre workers trying to close deals with each other.
What about the Big Board? (Score:2)
Where are all the mineshaft's to protect us from the Cobalt-Thorium G? And, where can I find the catalog so that I can choose the 10 woman I'm suposed to service?
Yeah, this is somewhat off topic, but I'm having a crappy day and any kind of diversion is a good thing.
myke
Spoke to someone who lives near (Score:5, Informative)
Personal perspective (Score:5, Informative)
I visited the site of the fire (well, the ground above the site!) at lunch time, and the streets were still full of fire engines and other emergency services.
I'm told by our ISP that they are unsure of the extent of the damage but hope to get things back by tomorrow. I left a cronjob running that should mail me here every hour and so far I've heard nothing from it, so I suspect tomorrow will be spent getting colocated facilities activated.
Re:Personal perspective (Score:2)
How Long To Fix? (Score:2)
Different kinds of fixes (Score:4, Informative)
- If the building that a phone switch is in catches fire, that's severely ugly, potentially weeks before most people have service.
- Copper Cables connecting telco offices to end-users usually aren't diverse; if you lose a bundle of them, it's really annoying - splicing big fat bundles of copper takes days, and it's going to be a few days before it's safe to go into the tunnel and assess the damage, much less fix it.
- Fiber optic long-haul trunks connecting telco offices *shouldn't* be a big problem, unless they've done a really bad job of diversity planning. They're usually arranged in ring or mesh topologies, with enough excess capacity that they can reroute the traffic around any (single) failures. In the US (at least for the telco I work for), that rerouting would happen in seconds or minutes, if there's enough capacity available to restore all the service, and the rest of it would be scrounged up with manual intervention, usually much faster than physical restoration (certainly true in this case.) For short stretches of physical restoration around damage (they have a mile here, which is a bit long), it's not uncommon to run temporary fiber above ground on poles or in as protected a route as you can cobble together, and post a bunch of guys in orange vests to watch it until they get the regular circuit rebuilt.
- Fiber circuits to local end-users (mostly large businesses) and fibers feeding local telephone-copper concentrators are normally built in rings, with enough spacing between them that they're not supposed to have multiple failures from a single event, and restoration is simple and happens in under a second. The main exception to this is supposed to be multiple simultaneous failures - TWO street construction crews not checking before they dig, or a big flood.
The description of the "44 bundles of 24 fibers" sounds like long-haul, but maybe it's metro ring stuff. This sounds disturbingly like they had a bunch of access that wasn't diverse enough, because they assumed that the tunnels were safe from careless backhoe drivers, but maybe it's not that bad.Overdependence on communications (Score:5, Insightful)
Earlier, in the absense of adequate infrastructure, people used to depend on local resources - the water table (borewells/rain) for water, small local power stations/generators for electricity, and ofcourse local businesses for banking, etc.
With the coming of the phone system and internet, we work from home, depend on phone services for emergency help, bank with businesses across the country/world, and depend on long distance communications for the most basic needs like water/electricity.
True, these advances in technology offer a large number of benefits and conveniences, but overabundance on them can cause widespread problems due to a failure of a small part of the communication system.
A problem with the electricity grid causes 1/4th of the nation to shut down, people take phone services for granted in order to provide/receive emergency assistance, and there are no adequate backup measures in place.
The internet is a pretty resilient beast, but the rest of the infrastructure (telephone, electricity, water pipes (very few apartments/houses have water storage) is pretty fault-intolerant and prone to massive-widespread failure (not necessarily to the problem with the system itself - in this case a fire). The 911 problem in NYC, this fire in the UK, and ofcourse underline the fact that we either need to have an adequately fault resistant infrastructure in place, or stop overdepending on it for critical services.
More News (Score:5, Informative)
EMERGENCY services, homes and businesses were hit after an underground fire in Manchester city centre cut 130,000 phone lines.
The blaze, in a tunnel by the junction of George Street and Princess Street, destroyed cables connected to the national phone network.
Related News:
No time limit for Manchester phone lines fix [timesonline.co.uk]
Fire wipes out internet in Manchester [vnunet.com]
BT tunnel fire cuts off Manchester phone lines [4ni.co.uk]
BT fire disrupts emergency services [theregister.co.uk]
Businesses hit by BT fire [zdnet.co.uk]
Phones Out of Action after Fire in Tunnel [scotsman.com]
Tunnel fire knocks out phone network [itvregions.com]
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Credit Cards (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Credit Cards (Score:5, Insightful)
Malt vinegar and fish oil contributed largely to.. (Score:5, Funny)
Spoken like a true yank (Score:2)
Don't worry (Score:5, Funny)
This backup system is fire-proof, though it can be degraded by smoke and fog.
Nuclear Communications Bunker: Destroyed by Fire. (Score:2, Interesting)
If it was built to survive a nuclear war, you would think that it would be resistant to a fire.
OK, the thing was probably built ages ago, so maybe the fire-resistant insulation has worn out or something but you would think a Nuclear Bunker would be pretty durrable.
Was it an electrical fire?
Was the wiring bad or worn out?
Have they rewired it in the last 50 years or so?
Guess they will have to now.
Your grandad paid for this tunnel (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Your grandad paid for this tunnel (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Your grandad paid for this tunnel (Score:3, Informative)
Actually it gets paid for a couple times by us and several more times by our grandchildren.
The resources spent on a project run on borrowed or printed money are resources that aren't available for other purposes - and thus drive up the price of that category of goods. Money "borrowed" by inflating the currency is value sucked out of the dollars and dollar-denominated resources held by the general population - y
Re:Your grandad paid for this tunnel (Score:3, Funny)
Modded funny??? Insightful, maybe, pathetically true, maybe, but definitely not funny.
Poor Britian (Score:2, Funny)
In Other News... (Score:2)
(In case you don't get it, Chapel Street - the entrance to the Guardian system is where they filmed Jimmy Beck's swansong in his last episode of Cracker).
Doesn't add up? (Score:4, Interesting)
-psy
Re:Doesn't add up? (Score:2)
Re:Doesn't add up? (Score:2)
In fact, the more I read...the more it sounds like a single exchange/central office that's down...which is similar to what happened here in downtown Toronto a few years back and was fixed in about a day or so. (Major fire at a CO).
-psy
Re:Doesn't add up? (Score:2)
Also, I read a report that people may be able to phone into an affected line from further afield yet be unable to phone it from somewhere fairly local. Presumably down to BTs fairly rigid internal routing in parts of its network.
MaNap is fine (Score:5, Informative)
I live near the site of the fire, I work for a telco and yet the most significant disruption I've seen to my life was the traffic around Manchester City Centre!
Since when does... (Score:3, Funny)
Did someone not tell the guys who designed and built this stuff that fire is a frequent side-effect of nuclear detonations?
This could be good for Manchester (Score:4, Insightful)
The very sad part is that change only comes on the heels of disaster. Perhaps the people in that area will get wireless service until this is resolved?
I'm sure there are places in America that are equally vulnerable, too.
On a small sample - DSL down, ISDN up (Score:3, Interesting)
BOFH (Score:4, Funny)
BOFH... England... get it?
Get 'Guardian' back online quickly! (Score:2, Funny)
BT spin artist at work.... (Score:3, Informative)
"There are 44 cables in the tunnel, each containing 24 fibre optic cables, which together can carry an awful lot of traffic," said Mr Cook.
"That is why we bury them so far underground, to protect them from being accidentally cut by people working on the road. It is too early to say how long it will take to repair until the engineers can get in there and work out how much damage has been done."
####
I guess he should read slashdot before posting...
Manchester Computing Data Centre Unaffected (Score:3, Informative)
I blame it on Morrisey (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Oh no! (Score:4, Informative)
The BBC news report I saw earlier on stated that BT planned on issuing mobile phones temporarily to people elderly living in sheltered housing.
Re:Oh no! (Score:2)
The elderly living in un-sheltered housing, however, get scraps of cardboard cut into the shape of a mobile phone. Oh... and a doggy-bicsuit for good luck and/or snackies.
Re:Oh no! (Score:2)
Re:Oh no! (Score:4, Funny)
Being british, they're able to cope with the suffering. Stiff upper lip and all that.
If it happened in the USA the public outcry would be deafening.
Re:Oh no! (Score:2)
Go privatised monopoly.
Re:Whoa.. where is the redunancy (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't think so. There's just no way to make the last mile wire services redundant to an average residence or business in a way that is cost justifiable. Go buy a cell phone.
Re:Whoa.. where is the redunancy (Score:2)
The box has since been removed... so I offially have no flip on access to another phone that runs over diffrent poles to a diffrent CO.
Re:Whoa.. where is the redunancy (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Whoa.. where is the redunancy (Score:5, Informative)
Edinburgh and London are the backups, according to what a friend of mine once told me.
This friend was one who worked on pulling out the last analogue switching units from that particular underground exchange. He had a tape of the sound the analogue exchange made before they pulled it out too... 'twas fascinating.
Right now, most calls are bypassing Manchester, and going to the other two main trunk stations - and if you're calling from Birmingham, you're probably going through Edinburgh to get to your destination.
Manchester has "Guardian" Birmingham has "Anchor" (Score:3, Informative)
Birmingham Anchor Exchange [birminghamanchor.co.uk]
I personally remember when a section of house-brick wall partially collapsed in the Bristol-street motors underpass on the Bristol road, revealing what appeared to be a huge concrete plug for one of the original level access tunnels used in construction.
Birmingham Anchor stretched from Bristol road / Smallbrook Queensway in the South, to Telephone House in the West, Churc
Re:Whoa.. where is the redunancy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Were this the US... (Score:2)
All you can do is to have lots of spare parts and cables.
Re:Secret US installations? (Score:4, Insightful)
Major UK cities - certainly London and Manchester - have existed as proper brick-built towns since the Roman empire around two thousand years ago. That's a LOT of digging, building and rebuilding. Hence it is very difficult to put anything in a city without being noticed - you have to knock something down, or at least disconnect something, first. It's quite common for a builder to discover two thousand year old foundation stones when putting up a new house. So bumping into 50-year-old three-mile-long nuclear bunker isn't exactly going to take much detective work.
Also we have a lot of people in a very small space- our country has 60 million people in an island only 600 miles long. We don't have any unpopulated deserts, mountain ranges or ice shelves where you could go and build an Evil Lair and not be noticed. Anywhere you do anything in the UK, you are going to get spotted by the general public.
During World War 2 there was a massive campaign to make it the average citizen's "duty" to keep quiet about strange millitary goings-on. This carried through to the Cold War. Nowadays, though, the main targets aren't secret bases, they're office blocks and hotels, so this duty of secrecy has faded.
Being a small country, we've never had the room to build enormous Area 51 style secret bases. Guardian (Manchester), Anchor (Birmingham) and Kingsway (London) only have about three miles of tunnels each, and they're the largest in the UK - absolutely tiny in comparison to the ranch estates possible in the USA. So our old bunkers are too small to be useful today and too crammed-in to be extended.
They're of no practical use. That's why you hear about them- because you're allowed to, they're useless. Heck, Guardian doesn't even have exchange equipment inside it any more - only the fiber cabling. Guardian is basically used only as a handy tunnel to save digging up the road [timesonline.co.uk]- it isn't "secret", it's more "convenient and otherwise worthless" (the problem is, of course, that it was so convenient that they put *most* of Manchester's fibre down there, including most of the backups).
Whereas the US bunkers are presumably big enough and extendable enough to still be in use. So Joe Public isn't going to be poking his nose in there any time soon.