Cascading effects ...UPDATE
PHONES GO DEAD, TORONTO PUT ON HOLD
Fire in Bell Canada switching station knocks out more than 100,000 lines
Saturday, July 17, 1999
Toronto -- An accidentally dropped tool was the beginning of a chain-reaction disaster that led to a communications meltdown for Canada's biggest city yesterday.
For Toronto, it was a day when the phones didn't ring, credit cards didn't work, and countless plans went out the window, from ordering an airline ticket to closing a real estate deal.
The breakdown, which lasted for most of the business day, had repercussions across the country. Credit-card transactions as far away as Vancouver couldn't be processed, and hundreds of bank machines went out of service.
Toronto found itself having what amounted to an electronic nervous breakdown. Some brokerages couldn't process trades. Customers found themselves unable to call an ambulance, order a taxi, or pay with plastic.
At the Art Gallery of Ontario, extra guards were required for Old Masters paintings after security lines went down. Traffic-light sequencing was knocked out. Travel agents couldn't book flights -- or take calls from customers.
And if you were hoping to get rich quick, there was bad news: Ontario Lottery Corp. terminals were out of service, making it impossible to buy last-minute tickets for last night's unusually high Super 7 draw.
"People are passing up $10-million," said H.W. Chan, manager of the Sun Wa Book Store on Spadina Avenue.
The cause of the problems was a telephone system breakdown that began with an early-morning fire at a Bell Canada switching centre on Simcoe Street downtown. The fire reportedly began after a repairman dropped a
tool.
The tool landed on electrical equipment and the fire spread quickly. At its peak, more than 70 firefighters were on the scene.
What followed was a series of failures that revealed the fragility of the complex communication systems society takes for granted. Although backup batteries were in place to power the switching system, they were designed to last only a few hours.
The backup plan called for the use of diesel emergency generators after the batteries failed, but officials decided that wasn't safe because of the water left by emergency sprinklers.
When the batteries began failing, at around 10.30 a.m., service to approximately 113,000 Bell phone lines was wiped out. Most of those lines were in Toronto's downtown core, the most communications intensive patch in Canada.
The breakdown left Barry Gutteridge, Toronto's commissioner of works and emergency services, shaken about the city's vulnerability. Mr. Gutteridge said there will be an investigation into the accident, with a view to reducing the city's exposure in the future.
Other than a repairman injured at the site of the explosion, Mr. Gutteridge said, the disruption injured no one. Instead, it caused a series of potential crises that were averted only through luck and improvisation.
Mr. Gutteridge, for example, had to co-ordinate the city's emergency fire and ambulance services from the radio room at Fire Hall No. 1 on Adelaide Street when both his office line and cellphone failed. When the backup system conked out at Bell Canada, ambulance services managed to notify Mr. Gutteridge about the magnitude of the problem by E-mail.
Despite the frustrating communications problems, Mr. Gutteridge said, fire and ambulance services responded efficiently. The host of complications included the failure of all telephone lines to the Hospital for Sick Children. A mobile radio unit was sent to the hospital to handle emergency calls.
Bell Canada spokesman Don Hogarth said the 911 emergency service was maintained, although its capacity to handle calls was impaired. Mr. Gutteridge said that if 911 had gone down, mobile radio units would have been sent to affected areas to give members of the public a way of calling in emergencies.
Mr. Hogarth said the area most affected was between College Street to the north, Queen Street to the south, Bathurst Street to the west and Bay Street to the east. The shutdown "zigzagged" to areas outside that core zone as well, he said, depending which phone lines they relied on.
Several investigations are being conducted, including a Labour Ministry investigation into the industrial accident, the fire marshal's investigation, and Bell Canada's investigation, in which Mr. Gutteridge said the city will be involved.
The effects of the outage were widespread, ranging from the institutional to the personal.
Nancy Tarek of Oakville sat in the lobby of Toronto General Hospital for several hours yesterday, pumped full of painkillers, Valium and other sedatives after a medical procedure.
Because of her condition, Ms. Tarek wasn't allowed to go home by herself. But because the phones were out, she couldn't call her family to come pick her up.
"I'm just sitting here half-medicated," she said.
Some Torontonians found virtually all their communication options cut off: Telephones, fax machines, pagers and cellphones routed through the Adelaide Street Bell switching system were all knocked out.
Many securities dealers had problems communicating trades and relied on cellphones until phone lines were back up, but the Toronto Stock Exchange kept operating.
At University Avenue Funds, mutual-fund sales people who couldn't make calls simply went home.
A skeleton staff remained, processing transactions made before the phones crashed.
"I'm trying to fax over trades to the bank and they won't go," accountant Shelina Dossa said.
Almost one-tenth of the cash machines operated by the country's six big banks were out of service for parts of the day, the Canadian Bankers Association said. The Toronto-Dominion Bank was hardest hit.
Hundreds of bank branches lost access to their systems. Many simply shut their doors and referred customers to other areas where phone lines were still working.
The electronic failure created a short-lived bonanza for couriers, who suddenly found themselves in high demand. At the Printing House copy centre on University Avenue, manager Chris Gennings said the cost of a courier had been driven up by the briefly altered market conditions.
"You go out on the street and offer them $10 and they say the going rate's $20," he said. "And if you argue, suddenly the going rate's $25."
The breakdown created a nightmare for retailers, who were unable to authorize debit or credit card transactions. Some, including Loblaws, accommodated customers -- and created a bankers' nightmare -- by taking customers' debit card numbers and phone numbers so banks could call them back to confirm the transaction.
Some businesses decided to do credit card transactions even though they couldn't get them approved.
"I hope and pray a lot of trustworthy people are shopping today," one retail manager said.
Hospitals and other medical services were seriously affected. Phone service was out at the Hospital for Sick Children, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto Western Hospital and Toronto General Hospital. Hospitals were also affected by the failure of pagers, which they use to track down specialists, surgeons and doctors on call.
Sick Children's poison-information and medical-information lines were shut down. Those two lines usually receive nearly 400 calls a day from all over the city and province.
The failure created chaos for many law offices, which found they were unable to close real-estate deals because the main clearinghouse for title searches was unavailable, putting millions of dollars worth of potential transactions in jeopardy.
Travel agents were particularly hard hit. David Gallie, manager of the Flight Centre on Queen Street West, said the day was a wipeout for
his business.
"I've lost $30,000 worth of sales," he said. "Clients can't order tickets. I can't call the airlines, and I can't book a seat. And I can't sell a ticket because the credit-card authorization system is down."
For Toronto police, the failure meant the loss of phone and computer systems, although their radios and most cellphones still worked.
Constable Don Petrie, who works in the Eaton Centre, said the phone failure gave police "a bit of a taste" of what could happen if the millennium bug wipes out computer systems on January 1.
"It's a bucket of cold water," he said. "It shakes you back to what it was like when we didn't have these services."
globeandmail.ca
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"we should also obviously expect that we will have a large number, possibly, of what would be manageable failures taken one at a time, which will overwhelm the normal emergency response processes when they happen all at once." ...
"we've asked FEMA to... make clear to the state and local emergency managers ... that those local governments should not assume that the federal government and FEMA will be able to come to their assistance no matter what their problem is, because we may have so many problems in localities across the country that we can't be everywhere at once. "
John Koskinen, Chair - President's Council on Y2K Conversion
Transcript, APEC Summit, May 4, 1999
United States Information Agency
pdq2.usia.gov@pdqtest1.env?CQ_SESSION_KEY=YLWXNVIGNNZM&CQ_QUERY_HANDLE=123990&CQ_CUR_DOCUMENT=1&CQ_PDQ_DOCUMENT_VIEW=1&CQSUBMIT=View&CQRETURN=&CQPAGE=1
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CBS July 15, 1999
CITIES NOT READY FOR Y2K
- Only 2% of 21 Biggest U.S. Cities are Prepared
- 9 States say they're less than 70% ready
- Computer glitches could disrupt city operations
The nine states that reported having completed work on less than 70% of their most important systems are New Hampshire, Ohio, Alabama, Louisiana, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, California and Hawaii ...
"Completing Y2K activities in the last months of the year increases the risk that key services will not be Y2K-ready in time for 2000 because there will not be enought time to deal with unanticipated complications,' Willemssen said ...
Sen. Robert Bennett, a Utah Republican who heads the special Y2K committee, said he feared that many state and local governments were "leaving little room for testing, contingency planning and unexpected problems."
"Only very efficient executive-level management and contingency planning can sustain us through the upcoming historic date change."
Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.
cbs.com
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WASHINGTON - Dozens of towns and cities across Texas were faulted
at a Senate hearing Thursday for ignoring inquiries about their readiness for year 2000 computer problems.
One hundred of the state's municipalities were contacted by staffers with the Senate's special committee on the year 2000 problem, but only 25 responded.
"What are you going to do about people who insist on remaining asleep?" asked Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va. "What are they going to do in the face of a dire emergency - sleep through it?" ...
Of the 25 Texas municipalities responding to the Senate survey, two-thirds said their emergency services were ready for the year 2000. Fewer than half said they have a written contingency plan in case of failures, and hardly any reported independent verification of repaired equipment.
dallasnews.com
Cheryl
167 Days until 2000
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