I've heard a really interesting war story from a Googler who was in the NOC when the Japanese earthquake that took out their nuclear power stations out hit - and cut the fibres on the sea bed. He reckons they were probably the first people on the planet to know something was happening.

Apparently their immediate response was just to reroute everything through the cables on the other side of the country that were still top, and let their bosses know it was happening. They didn't slow down to ask for permission to light up half a country's worth of bandwidth, then just did it.