Paul Posted April 5, 2009 Report Share Posted April 5, 2009 Major communications cables cut in deep underground tunnel East London. A third party contractor has caused significant damage to one of our deep underground tunnels resulting in the loss of service to a large number of end users in parts of East London Due to the nature of the damage, which happened 32 meters below street level, and the restricted access to the site, it is not possible at this stage to provide an exact timeframe as to when service will be restored to all customers. http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/news/generalbriefings/downloads/2009/briefing_gen027_09.pdf It begs the question how deep do they have to bury these things to keep them safe! 32m below the surface is not exactly a shallow trench/tunnel! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scooby_simon Posted April 5, 2009 Report Share Posted April 5, 2009 It begs the question how deep do they have to bury these things to keep them safe! 32m below the surface is not exactly a shallow trench/tunnel! Old tube tunnel / vents? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Calm Chris Posted April 7, 2009 Report Share Posted April 7, 2009 When Mercury 1st came to play communications with BT they bought an old hydraulic pumping station in the Docklands. The reason was that the pumping station served to provide hydraulic power for lifts to all the hotels in the West end in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. This meant they had 500 miles of defunct tubes / tunnels were there to use as ducting for a backbone of fibre to the majority of London's commercial sectors. A fantastic coup at the time due to expense saved on digging new. In the City there is a myriad of tunnels. BT have some, MOD have some, there's ones built in WW2, there's the escape tunnels at Buck Palace and all the primary Government buildings, the post office used to have a mail train tunnel, then there's today power, gas, water, sewage. There's a lot of stuff under the paths and roads of London. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cupramax Posted April 8, 2009 Report Share Posted April 8, 2009 A company that one of my mates works for was knocked out by this, apparently the cable was hit by a tunnel boring machine doing prep work for the Olympics site hence it was so far underground. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glovepup Posted April 8, 2009 Report Share Posted April 8, 2009 yeah this caused a big problem at the Ilford exhange, that also went down towards the end of last year I think causing disruption. That point has interconnects from all over the UK so would not just affect users in that location, I think Tiscali were worst affected by this which is not good due to their current financial situation. But it did hit many other providers, I heard they were having to also contend with flooding so not a good experience for the engineers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
redrob Posted April 8, 2009 Report Share Posted April 8, 2009 some of you may know a road in Wokingham called the "seven mile ride". Running the whole length of that road is a 10 inch oil main that runs from the docks at Southampton to Heathrow airport and is buried in the same footpath as the 10" medium pressure gas main. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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