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To: Teddy who wrote (1531)	8/21/1999 3:32:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15615

Teddy, a few things about the fishing trawlers. These have been the nemeses of transoceanic cable crossings since Noah first got caught up in an ancient telegraph pipe. The prospect of two failures occurring simultaneously seem remote, but those are the ones that get you the worst. When I was in operations I once held the 'trick' of being the North American restoration coordinator for the Atlantic Basin. Our contingency plan called for backing up transatlantic telephone (TAT) cables onto other TATs and Satellites during individual submarine failures. Older vintage radiotelphone was still held in readiness for some contingencies, too. On one evening we experienced a failure of TAT-4 to St. Hillaire, France (caused by a fishing trawler), and we began backing up onto one of the Intelsat birds. Halfway through bringing Paris and Frankfurt back to life, the stabilizers on the bird went cafooey. At that point, as you could imagine, we suddenly and without any warning or clue found ourselves in deep... er, water, so to speak. It was during that fiasco that I first got to meet many of the heads of the then AT&T Long Lines Department (president on down) and gained my initial exposure into the land of disaster recovery planning. Prior to TAT 5 in 1969-70 these incidents were more frequent (on a per cable experience basis). It was during the TAT 5 implementation that cable laying operations first began burying cables along the continental shelves, and then dropping them into deeper waters farther out where they were effectively draped between mountain peaks. Another thing that has caused a lessening of these occurrences was the end of the cold war, since many of the fishing trawlers weren't really doing any fishing at all. Use your imagination. Regards, Frank Coluccio ps - As an added point of interest, Bob Annunziata had at that time recently joined the first line management staff in the office in which this piece of trivia took place.