Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!snorkelwacker!mit-eddie!rutgers!texbell!vector!telecom-gateway From: brian@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Disaster Communications Message-ID: Date: 20 Oct 89 11:33:03 GMT Sender: news@vector.Dallas.TX.US Reply-To: Brian Kantor Organization: University of California, San Diego Network Operations Lines: 39 Approved: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 465, message 5 of 8 There is a statewide police radio service in California, but it can get congested easily and I recall seeing bulletins asking that it not be used for anything but the highest-priority traffic in times of emergency. Much of it piggybacks on microwave circuits, some of which were not in operation because of fallen or twisted towers and power problems. The CERFnet, BARRNet, Calinet, and associated computer networks mostly kept running throughout much of this, although there were some outages due to power failures at a few key points, and coincidently a circuit between Stanford and Berkeley had failed a couple of hours before the quake hit. We had communications from San Diego to Stanford and UC Santa Barbara at all times; UC Santa Cruz came back online in a couple of hours once they had their emergency power up, and UC Davis and UC Berkeley were back early in the morning. UC San Francisco was back on-line before noon the following day. The UC Office of the President in Oakland was never offline. Most of this network is T1, much of it over PacBell and MCI fiber, with a few microwave links. None of it is dialup, so this traffic did not impact congested voice circuits. The E-mail community was passing "health and welfare" sort of traffic using electronic mail for much of the night, and I know that many families slept easier that night because of the electronic mail capabilities of the various computer networks. Although I handled little of this traffic myself, I certainly saw lots of it go through to the quake area. In the last day or so, we've seen a peak of more than 20% over our normal E-mail load, and we're as far south in California as you can get - more than 400 miles away from the quake. I expect that's because we're well-connected and much of the normal E-mail routing into the Bay Area is still in the process of coming back online. - Brian