Facilities don't really keep that large of an inventory of fuel on site. Usually once they start running they have to call for fuel immediately and be regularly refueled until power is restored. They don't have a week of fuel or anything like that.

I don't see why natural gas is such a bad backup for utility electric. It doesn't share fate with the electric grid and it's buried. Seems pretty good.

How long will the gas grid keep working without electricity? Sure, the pressure is likely maintained from a reservoir, but many of the control systems likely depend on electricity, and I could imagine some being fail-safe (solenoids holding valves open and shutting if power fails).

For a very long time. The natural gas infrastructure uses natural gas generators to run the pumps that pressurize the lines and the meters are 100% mechanical. There's no reliance on the electrical grid. I lived through Northeast Blackout of 2003 (visible from space, the extent was so great) and Hurricane Sandy (power was out for a week) and in neither case was there an interruption to natural gas service. In my 40+ years, I don't ever recall the natural gas service ever going "out".

Gas runs forever without electricity. My folks have a gas generator on a pad at their home because ice storms take down the electric grid every year in their town. This year it ran for ten days straight.

Pressure in natural gas infrastructure is maintained by pumping stations that are fueled by the gas. These are huge and impressive and usually located far from any town.

It depends how well it is maintained, like most infrastructure.

https://www.wvpublic.org/news/2014-03-10/ntsb-determines-cau...

They deliberately do not use grid electricity, as they don't like sparking and there is no need for it. It's just simple mechanical pressure regulators, along with gas turbine compressors on long supply lines to boost the pressure.

Have they ever used those pressure-reducing stations to produce electricity?

Never sure if it went from theoretical to actual.

https://www.google.com/search?q=natural+gas+pressure+reducer...

A guy working in this building told me they had showers to clean off radioactive fallout as the building itself could stand up to a bomb. Guy said “you’d be fucked either way” and laughed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street

It's probably not in this case but i wonder if this ATT was a special surveillance nexus...

I think it's most likely the bomb wasn't meant to target anything, but was just some person's outlet

Edit: i wasn't saying, "nuclear protection probably wasn't the case", i was saying, "the comment I'm about to make probably isn't the case but"... I know it's unclear

It’s a collection point of domestic VOIP for the FAIRVIEW program.

Nice find!

I stayed up late looking at network maps/etc trying to figure out any special features of the location, this was the only thing I could find. Likely coincidence, possibly not, but very high chance many people at 3-letter orgs have had a busy 24 hours as they also need to rule out some of the more exotic motives.

Where do you find such maps? I've looked before and it seems like a lot of the useful information isn't public

Lot of Snowden files still out there.

This is a relic of the cold war. Most of AT&T's telecom buildings were designed to be able to withstand just about everything except a direct nuclear strike.

While services were impacted, none of the actual infrastructure was really damaged and they likely just need to repair the lines running up to the building.

TLDR: AT&T's telecom infra is a relic of the cold war and is designed to withstand almost any type of attack.

Underrated comment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

>While I'm only speculating, it could be quite possible that whoever may have wished to damage or destroy the AT&T building, seriously underestimated what these kind of buildings can take (essentially being disguised bunkers).

Which somehow makes it more plausible to me? The type of insane person who would do this seems like the type of insane person who would underestimate how reinforced such a building is.

It’s odd that if you knew why the building was valuable you wouldn’t also know it’s designed for this. Which makes me lean more towards coincidence.

Maybe they were blowing it up to stop 5G rays from spontaneously generating viruses, in which case if they didn't really know what they were doing beyond a surface level it wouldn't come as a huge surprise.

It's not any rando that can get access to the levels of explosive necessary to do this in the domestic US, it's actually quite hard.

If you don't need it to be predictable or timely or anything than filling the interior of anything large with propane/natural gas can be enough to create a boom like this. It's essentially just replacing quality with quantity

Also on a vaguely related note getting annual statistics for meth lab explosions is surprisingly hard

Doesn't fit.

Either that, or they understood exactly what they were doing and simply needed to shut down 911 services for a while - perhaps so they could commit some sort of crime without the authorities being able to be summoned or coordinate.

Although someone choosing to bomb a place means I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t thinking everything through...

The announcement to move away shows a lot of planning.

yeah - as I commented elsewhere - mcveigh did a whole lot more damage with presumably less explosive (van vs. rv)

This really sounds like people playing with stuff they have no understanding of.

OKC bomb was in a Ryder box truck. Not a van.

Huh - you're right...Dunno why I thought it was a van.

Please provide evidence before spreading crazy conspiracy theories.

This looked way too bright/flamey/sooty to be a high explosive like McVeigh used.

Calling it a bunker might be overstating it. Maybe some are like bunkers or some have been reinforced. It’s hard to say.

Sometimes these central offices are put in really old buildings. Sometimes they are even put in regular homes in a neighborhood.

It’s simply based on where they need the connections/circuits and have access to electricity, etc.

No, a lot of AT&T buildings were built as bunkers, well blockhouses, during the Cold War. The typical "reinforced" criteria was being able to handle 2-3psi over pressure and storm force winds (70mph).

This particular building is an old AT&T-cum-BellSouth-cum-AT&T tandem office. It's where end offices (that connected to actual customer phones) would be connected together and connected to inter exchange carriers.

AFAIK AT&T tended to build their tandem offices as reinforced style buildings. They are larger than end offices and needed high availability because they were the central node for a region's telephone network and its connection to other networks.

I don't think I've ever seen any central office in a regular home in a neighborhood. Even end offices, while smaller than tandems, required a lot of equipment and power backups. Besides the equipment in the building they'd usually have secured parking/storage for service vehicles.

"Central Office" is the wrong term for it, but I've worked in a couple switching offices that were built to look just like another house in the tract. They were RSUs (Remote Switch Unit), that trunked everything back to a parent CO.

In both cases it was a housing tract that was allergic to ugly buildings or something. The vast majority of RSUs looked like smaller versions of the CO. Gray cinder blocks and asphalt.

That's interesting, I've only ever seen cross boxes (ugly green boxes) with RCUs in them. Then again I may have seen tons of disguised RSUs and never have known it.

To anyone interested, see "Anaheim 17"

http://www.thecentraloffice.com/calif/OC1/OCP.htm