In the "New Lessons Learned" category, we add Transport For London and their contractors. It appears that while working on new station upgrades, the contractor proceeded to fill an escalator void with fast setting concrete. Unfortunately, it appears that the details were not checked, and there was a small, itty bitty hole that allowed a foot of concrete to flow into the control equipment room. There are pictures and they are ugly, from an IT point of view. I have worked on rewiring network rooms, and that was without a foot of wet concrete to deal with. Looking at the picture, all of the equipment at the concrete level and below is toast, and the cabling at that level will also need to be replaced. All that after the concrete is cleared.
It reminds me of an incident once where on of the electrical contractors at our company was working on clearing old cabling between buildings to lay all new cabling for new equipment. After years of re-tasking, they could not stuff any more cable through the tubes and had to clear the dead cables. It was late in the day and everyone wanted to go home. The contractor was up an a ladder with the big shears and made a sizable cut. He examined it for a moment and then came down the ladder fairly quickly.
"Whelp, time to go home!"
"Well cool," replied the in house electrician. "So can we go over whats happening tomorrow before you leave?"
"Nope, gotta run, have an appointment to get to."
"Dave, you seem in a hurry all the sudden. Did you cut something?"
"Nope, gotta run!"
30 seconds after he hit the door the IT department lost it. He had cut all the fiber between the buildings instead of the old Cat5 cable next to it. We spent hours running new fiber patches to get the network back up in the other building. We had security guards, facilities staff and anyone willing to work overtime helping out. And that was just the patch, not the actual fix.
I wish them luck on this one. I see many hours of OT for many people to fix that mess.
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