The Oil Drum | DrumBeat: December 28, 2006

185 comments on DrumBeat: December 28, 2006

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klee on December 28, 2006 - 11:25am

Post Peak Drill

On Tuesday afternoon, nearly everyone in Humboldt County, California lost internet, cellular and long distance service due to a severed fiber optic cable (Why both DSL and Cable modems went out is beyond my cyber expertise). Around 2am a windstorm knocked out power for 24 hours. It ended up being a day of candles, Aladdin oil lamps, only gravity fed water from the storage tank and cooking my son’s birthday dinner on the wood stove. Just to add to the mix, a large tree went down on the road to town, requiring a 30 minute detour. Today all is back to normal (except a large number of dirty dishes that I decided to wait for some light to wash.) I always find these outages useful as drills. Last year’s extended outage made me realize an essential tool was missing – a non-electric coffee grinder! As the saying goes, “Death before dishonor, but nothing before coffee.”

Now, I have a lot of TOD posts to catch up on.

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step back on December 28, 2006 - 12:11pm

Pre-Peak Drill in the South Bay too.

Santa-Anna scale winds also knocked power out down here in the South Bay (San Jose, California). It wasn't a true practice drill for Peak Oil because we were able to retreat to the car and turn on the engine for heat, turn on the radio for entertainment. There was also the warm fuzzy comfort of knowing this will be over, at worst, in a day because the power company promised repair crews were on the way to reconnect the severed power lines.

In a real Post-Peak situation, there will be no gasoline-filled car to retreat to. There will be no promise of a better day tomorrow.

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capslock on December 28, 2006 - 3:22pm

We here recently found an exquisite antique hand coffee grinder on ebay UK for not much money. Check out the nice grinders they have in Europe.

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Sandor on December 28, 2006 - 8:14pm

klee said:
"Humboldt County, California lost internet, cellular and long distance service due to a severed fiber optic cable
(Why both DSL and Cable modems went out is beyond my cyber expertise)"

That fibre optic cable uses a technology called Sonet. Sonet links can be configured to offer multiple OCX, DS3 and sub-rate interfaces to carry both voice and data.

Most DSL systems (in Verizons footprint) aggregate net traffic and send it over an ATM connection carried by a Sonet link.

Obviously, the cable modem provider used the same fiber/Sonet link for all of its aggregated net traffic. As did the cellular and long distance providers.

Lobby the owner of the fiber optic connection (usually the phone company) to provide a survivable BLSR Sonet ring.

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