Domestic Earthquake Survivability [telecom]

After the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, GTE (Verizon) sunk steal poles 20 or so feet below the building to the roof. This was done in the Sylmar CO and a few others in the area. The building held up pretty well, it was the superstructure that failed. Since that time I have been in buildings during quakes and the building as well as the equipment held up.

Heck, in my area of south eastern New York the infrastructure can't hold up under an anticipated 20 to 30 inch snowstorm. Damage to overhead wires and poles from snow laden branches and auto accidents resulted in many homes being left without power, cable TV, FIOS, or POTS for up to a week. Tower sites lost power, switched to generator, ran out of fuel, switch to battery, and were down for days until a path was cut thru the snow by heavy plow equipment. At one major tower site a police helicopter was used to drop a power company lineman at a tower site to replace a pole fuse.

California had its first earthquake building codes enacted in the 1930s after the Long Beach earthquake.

In 1972 the Sylmar quake knocked down the 14' high SxS racks in the Sylmar GTE C.O. and damaged the building. The rebuild probrably would withstand a whole lot.

Pacific Telephone inherited from Home Telephone Company a huge SxS C.O. on Green Street in Pasadena. It has had a whole of of retrofits done over the years as more as been learned about earthquakes. Of course, all the 14' high racks are long gone.

These are representatives of improvements that I know to have been made to telco infrastructure.

It was 1971 for Sylmar, I know I was working that night in Sunland. I have some pictures of the Long Beach Main CO. Employees looking out from inside where the walls used to be. They are in a book on GTE California History that we were given some years ago. When the Northridge quake it, I had that day off, the first call I got was from my boss wanting to knew there was going to be an earthquake; I had told him I would not be working when we had another one.

I was managing a telephone call center when the Pretty Big One (the Loma Prieta quake) hit in 1989.

T-1 circuits from SF to Mountain View stayed up. Power was out in SF, but I think this was largely a precaution to avoid igniting natural gas fires (the apartment building in SF's Marina district that showed the massive fire was really a large gaslight fed by a gas main that our local utility PG&E couldn't figure how to turn off.

Local central offices seemed to be okay, but that was in the days when most of SF was wired to telco COs and they had backup batteries. I am told that Pacific Bell (the local RBOC) and AT&T (the long distance company) still shared the McCoppin Street (MArket exchange) central office and that before long, AT&T was draining PacBell's batteries.

Now, the thing about quakes is that they strike oddly. While the epicenter was in the Forest of Nicene Marks in the Santa Cruz Mountains between San Jose and Santa Cruz, it devastated an area of downtown Santa Cruz and leveled the downtown of, I think Hollister, but barely touched nearby Los Gatos or San Jose. It collapsed a freeway in Oakland (the Cypress Structure), about 60 miles from the epicenter, but didn't do much damage inbetween. It caused damage in San Francisco, but not much to speak of in the closer cities of San Mateo, Burlingame, Redwood City, etc. Also, none of those cities to my knowledge lost power.

So, basically I'm saying that hardwired equipment will probably be okay, but that you just can't know exactly what areas will be hit and which will remain untouched.