telecom@eecs.nwu.edu (TELECOM Moderator) (10/18/89)
At the time this is written, chaos is reigning in the Bay Area, and all telecommunications are knocked out. The latest death count is about 200 people, and this may be a low estimate. A large fire is burning out of control and has destroyed much property. I wish nothing but the best to our readers in the San Fransisco and Oakland area, and I hope that as communications are restored we will receive detailed reports of the disaster, particularly in reference to telecom activities. Berkeley is totally off line at this time, and email contact is not possible with the sites in the San Fransisco area. We seem to have been hit with so many disasters recently. First came the storm on the east coast; then a few days ago, the storm in the south which affected Texas and Louisiana.....and now this new horror. Patrick Townson
louie@sayshell.umd.edu (Louis A. Mamakos) (10/18/89)
While there were news reports regarding telephone problems in the SF Bay Area, connectivity via the NSFNET and BARRNET existed to at least NASA/Ames and Stanford. I fingered a bunch of likely machines looking for people that I know, but it seems as if most of them had left their machines. I noticed that later on in the early morning NASA/Ames dropped off the network.. perhaps their UPS finally gave up the ghost? louie [Moderator's Note: Berkeley was off line from loss of power early in the evening. I don't know when they came back up. PT]
dmr@csli.stanford.edu (Daniel M. Rosenberg) (10/20/89)
telecom@eecs.nwu.edu (TELECOM Moderator) writes: >At the time this is written, chaos is reigning in the Bay Area, and >all telecommunications are knocked out. The latest death count is >Berkeley is totally off line at this time, and email contact is not >possible with the sites in the San Fransisco area. >From Stanford, Internet service was available clear to everywhere within hours of the quake. (Well, I made it to Pennsylvania anyway a few hours later.) This was well before the phone service came back in. Pacific Bell had -- I believe -- no physical damage to the phone network, but it was way overcrowded. I believe that when the quake hit they switched over the to A/B/C setup discussed here a while back, where A phones (emergency, police, fire, etc.) got dial tone, and B and C phones -- everyone else -- were switched back and forth as to who got dial tone. The Stanford campus telephone network worked continuously with no problems. Long distance outward via AT&T, Sprint and MCI was scrambled. It turned out that Telesphere was useful for something; their network was quite clear and turned out to be an easy way to calm my nervous parents. ITI (10488) also worked. I am hoping this was ITI (aka ITT) and I didn't have everyone in my dorm make a $50 3 minute transcontinental or cross-state call. Long distance inward was clogged full until last night (Wednesday). Today, everything seems to be back to normal. # Daniel M. Rosenberg // Stanford CSLI // Eat my opinions, not Stanford's. # dmr@csli.stanford.edu // decwrl!csli!dmr // dmr%csli@stanford.bitnet
kent@husc6.harvard.edu (Kent Borg) (10/21/89)
In article <telecom-v09i0457m01@vector.dallas.tx.us> telecom@eecs.nwu.edu (TELECOM Moderator) writes: >X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 457, message 1 of 9 >At the time this is written, chaos is reigning in the Bay Area, and >all telecommunications are knocked out. The latest death count is Maybe at the time you wrote that, but by some time near 8PM PDT (11PM EDT) there where some phones with working long distance service--both incoming and outgoing. I was at a friend's house when the earth rumbled. Being near Boston we didn't feel it, and not watching TV or listening to the radio, we didn't know it happened. We found out when we got a call from another friend. She was calling from her apartment in San Francisco. She had no electricity and didn't have a battery powered TV or radio, so she phoned us to find out what was going on. We turned on the TV to find out. Later we called her back to tell her what we knew. The call to SF took a few tries to go through (maybe 10 minutes worth). We were impressed. Our call to SF was made by AT&T, I am told the sound quality was normal (I didn't talk to her myself). Kent Borg "Then again I could be foolish kent@lloyd.uucp not to quit while I'm ahead..." or -from Evita (sung by Juan Peron) ...!husc6!lloyd!kent