Redmond communications outage shows how vulnerable our critical infrastructure is

This morn­ing, at around at 9:30 AM Pacif­ic Day­light Time, a con­struc­tion crew work­ing on a stormwa­ter treat­ment project in NPI’s home­town of Red­mond, Wash­ing­ton acci­den­tal­ly caused a major telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions out­age for near­ly six thou­sand cus­tomers of Fron­tier Com­mu­ni­ca­tions (includ­ing yours tru­ly) when they dug in the wrong place and sev­ered vital fiber and cop­per wires.

The out­age, which is still ongo­ing, has result­ed in a total, cat­a­stroph­ic fail­ure of Fron­tier’s Inter­net, tele­vi­sion, and phone ser­vices in the Red­mond area. Affect­ed house­holds and busi­ness­es are not able to con­nect to the Net, watch any FiOS chan­nels, or place calls (even emer­gency calls) through Fron­tier’s infrastructure.

Fron­tier has tech­ni­cians onsite and is work­ing as fast as it can to restore ser­vice. A Fron­tier spokes­woman said the con­struc­tion crew that was at fault caused “con­sid­er­able dam­age”. There is no esti­mate of when ser­vice might be back up yet, but Fron­tier says its own peo­ple are work­ing “non­stop”. Ear­li­er this after­noon they were pulling mate­ri­als need­ed for the repairs, accord­ing to Fron­tier’s Twit­ter feed.

The City of Red­mond has also acknowl­edged the out­age on its web­site and on Twit­ter. City per­son­nel are work­ing with Fron­tier to fig­ure out what went wrong and how to get ser­vice back up for the thou­sands of peo­ple affected.

The out­age is more than an incon­ve­nience, par­tic­u­lar­ly for those with­out cel­lu­lar phone ser­vice, since it pre­vents them from call­ing 911 to sum­mon first respon­ders in the event of an emer­gency. The out­age has stretched on for eight hours already, and it might not be resolved for many more hours.

No doubt the city and Fron­tier will inves­ti­gate, and try to fig­ure out how this hap­pened. If the con­struc­tion com­pa­ny is at fault (and it sounds like they were) there should be appro­pri­ate consequences.

But regard­less of what the inves­ti­ga­tion uncov­ers, this and oth­er inci­dents demon­strate that our crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture is more vul­ner­a­ble than we might think.

In this case, one mis­guid­ed con­struc­tion crew was able to knock out Inter­net, phone, and tele­vi­sion ser­vices for a size­able frac­tion of the pop­u­la­tion of Wash­ing­ton’s nine­teenth largest city mere­ly by dig­ging in the wrong place.

It’s sober­ing to think about what might hap­pen to our crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture in the event of a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter like an earth­quake, or a human-caused calami­ty, like a ter­ror­ist attack. We are not as pre­pared for such events as we ought to be.

To min­i­mize telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion ser­vice dis­rup­tions, we should look at improv­ing redun­dan­cy along with imple­ment­ing bet­ter shield­ing to pro­tect our core fiber optic cables from being cut, either acci­den­tal­ly or purposefully.

Wash­ing­ton does par­tic­i­pate in the Call Before You Dig ini­tia­tive, as do Mon­tana and Ore­gon, but that effort could use more awareness.

A large amount of traf­fic flows over the pub­licly and pri­vate­ly owned trunk lines in this region and across the Unit­ed States. Their integri­ty matters.

At present, I am stay­ing con­nect­ed to the Inter­net through NPI’s wire­less provider, so it’s busi­ness as usu­al. But if we did­n’t have that redun­dan­cy, it would­n’t be.

Redun­dan­cy is a very good thing, and can guard against all sorts of prob­lems… from data loss and hard disk fail­ure to con­nec­tiv­i­ty dis­rup­tions. We need more of it.