After The Fire

Network maintenance crews for Internet backbone providers are used to dealing with outages caused by everything from errant backhoes to earthquakes. But this week's fiber outages in Baltimore presented a unique challenge.

On Wednesday, a freight train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed and caught fire in an old railroad tunnel under Howard Street in Baltimore. The fire and hazardous materials quickly damaged several large fiber-optic cables, creating outages in many East Coast cities and slowing Internet performance as carriers sought to reroute traffic.

But it wasn't as simple as finding the damaged cables and fixing them.

"It was immediately apparent to us that we would not be able to access our fiber in the tunnel anytime soon given the situation with the fire and hazardous materials," said Christopher Moore, Director of Operations for Metromedia Fiber Network in Baltimore. "We immediately began looking for an alternate route we could use to fully repair our network."

Metromedia immediately started redirecting network traffic. Meanwhile, the company's field engineering team began the tricky task of rerouting 24,000 feet of cable through a maze of city conduits in the center of Baltimore. Within 36 hours, an alternate fiber route was completed.

WorldCom teams were also working round the clock to lay new cable, and published reports said the networks of PSINet and AboveNet were also affected.

Was your connectivity affected by the Baltimore fire? How long did it take for traffic to return to normal? Add your comments below.