Nashville Bits and Pieces

[LA_TN]

10pm outage update from down detector

@dmillsphoto knows what has only been mentioned 1x on the news by a reporter during the police chief briefing. I don't have any direct connection to that company, I only know status of several data centers nearby. But it has been said that company took a direct hit, also

This is not a vulnerable location, nor is this unique to Nashville. That building is well fortified. Lines running into and out to surrounding buildings is isolated with some serious building codes and 24x7 monitoring of all service tunnels. Security is tight for several buildings in that area - not just the switch building. I had to get security clearance just to visit the building next door 

3 minutes ago, MLBrumby said:

Anyone here (Baronakim, PHofKS, Rookzie, et.al.) know the history of ATT's presence on Second Avenue? If it's like the old ATT building in downtown Atlanta, it was used early on to house the switchboard operators who plugged the circuit boards to connect phone calls. It was expanded several times during the middle 20th Century. I'd expect that's the original site (if not building) of ATT's first 'modern' operations in Nashville (ca. 1920). 

Ditto, and I had heard that 5 or 7 floors of that building were no longer used by AT&T. But I don't know if those floors are vacant or leased out

[MLBrumby]

That would explain why we haven't been able to call family in Atlanta. But did get a call from someone in Knoxville today. 

[jmtunafish]

The site of the explosion is now on Google Maps.

To me, I wonder if this bombing was just a test.  I mean, the bomber went out of his way to make sure no one would be killed or even injured.  Consider this:  shots were fired, either real or from a loudspeaker, which attracted the police.  Then once the police were there, the warning started blaring from the RV that everyone in the area needed to be evacuated.  That early in the morning, particularly on Christmas morning, if the police weren't there to evacuate people, it's likely that not everyone would've heard or heeded the warning.

So I wonder if this is just a precursor to a much larger attack somewhere else on some other data center or some similar facility.  I seriously doubt--if this were the case--that they would attempt another attack on the Nashville data center.  But maybe this was just a trial run to see just how much damage someone could do to our communications infrastructure from such a minor attack ("minor" compared to attacks like 9-11 or OKC).  Whoever did this--if that's what their goal was--is an evil genius; most anyone else would've merely bombed a cell tower or two which would've resulted in just a fraction of the disruption to the communications network.

Whatever the reason, this whole thing makes me sick to my stomach.

Edited December 26, 2020 by jmtunafish

[MidTenn1]

1 hour ago, MLBrumby said:

Anyone here (Baronakim, PHofKS, Rookzie, et.al.) know the history of ATT's presence on Second Avenue? If it's like the old ATT building in downtown Atlanta, it was used early on to house the switchboard operators who plugged the circuit boards to connect phone calls. It was expanded several times during the middle 20th Century. I'd expect that's the original site (if not building) of ATT's first 'modern' operations in Nashville (ca. 1920). 

I remember it in the late 70's when I worked in the JK Polk State Office Building. We could see what we called the microwave relay towers some of which were pointed at us. The towers are gone, now. The taller red building must have been built in the early 70's or late  60's. I noticed on the aerial views today that there's some serious air conditioning equipment on the roof. I was under the impression (probably from something I heard) the thickness of the walls and lack of windows was to shield the equipment from stray electromagnetic waves and radiation. Distant memories!!

Edited December 26, 2020 by PHofKS

[donNdonelson2]

I am currently visiting family in a rural county in middle Tennessee. This county, like many others, is without regular 9-1-1 services due to the explosion. Unlike some other places, they are also completely without any ability to call a local number for emergency services. All their landlines are AT&T and are out. The county posted on Facebook that anyone needing to contact emergency personnel should come to the police station in town. (I’m assuming you also take yourself to the hospital in any medical emergency.) Our communities are extremely vulnerable due to this attack!

Edited December 26, 2020 by donNdonelson2

[Sean blackdog]

I see with van on left side. I think van exploded. 

 

[Nathan_in_DC]

9 hours ago, MLBrumby said:

Anyone here (Baronakim, PHofKS, Rookzie, et.al.) know the history of ATT's presence on Second Avenue? If it's like the old ATT building in downtown Atlanta, it was used early on to house the switchboard operators who plugged the circuit boards to connect phone calls. It was expanded several times during the middle 20th Century. I'd expect that's the original site (if not building) of ATT's first 'modern' operations in Nashville (ca. 1920). 

I don't know the details exactly, but I do know it was built post-war, probably mid 1960s. It's a fairly standardized design for AT&T switch buildings for the switching gear. Even automated switches from that era took up huge amounts of space, with miles of copper cables, relays, and switches, along with workshops and offices for personnel to manage the systems. Most of these buildings were built to a semi-hardened status designed to withstand bb attacks with minimal damage to the interior (e.g., reinforced concrete floors, walls designed to deflect blasts and collapse outwards of they fail, controlled entry points, etc.). Since the end of the Cold War, many of the hardening aspects of these buildings were neglected or removed, but significant amounts of security were re-installed after 9/11. Please note, the following paragraphs are intended only to stimulate discussion on the importance of redundancy in essential infrastructure. The same applies to energy grids, transportation networks, fuel supplies, etc., all of which have been made terribly vulnerable from decades of complacency.

There are a few interesting points to the impacts we're seeing here. First off, either the hardening was poorly designed, or retrofits (such as improved fire safety) negated the original benefits of the design. It sounds like much of the damage was caused by water, and the outages were caused because the back up generators relied on natural gas, which was promptly shut off because of leak fears. It seems to me that this was the first failure to plan: tying back up generators for essential services to outside energy supplies instead of installing self-contained diesel systems. 

Secondly, a glaring lack of redundancy exists in the system. If this goes out, there is no fallback. The system (apparently) doesn't have the ability to quickly reroute essential and high priority services (such as 911 and ATC) to a backup or neighboring node, like Atlanta, Memphis, or St. Louis.

Finally, not only is the centralized infrastructure inadequate, but the dispersed infrastructure apparently is unable to cope. It sounds like a number if the local  systems relied on bundle services, where their land line and Internet was provided by AT&T, as were their back up cellular systems...all which went down. The fact that all your primary and backup services short of radio apparently route through a bottleneck is incredibly poor planning. It does seem that non-emergency lines in most areas continued working though, which is good. I presume local circuits were unaffected by the outage, and are able to operate independently of the node.

Luckily, the odds of an earthquake happening here are lower than west or east Tennessee, but they're not non-existent. In my mind, that's the worst case scenario. Earthquake hits, causes damage to the gear in the building and cuts off the fuel supplies for the back up generators. Much of the emergency services communication and coordination system is now down indefinitely when it's most needed.

Caveat: this is entirely speculation based on my own understanding of the infrastructure involved and my experience working on continuity of operations planning. So, some professional knowledge of how this should work, informed by available news on the incident. I've never worked in this particular building and do not know the details of the design or subsequent retrofits.

Edited December 26, 2020 by Nathan_in_the_UK
fixed typo

[downtownresident]

Person/s of interest identified in bombing: 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nashville-bombing-person-of-interest-identified/

[bnacincy]

The city needs a comprehensive plan to completely rebuild 2nd Avenue to its original state-the AT&T building needs to be completely torn down and relocated to a safe and secure spot in an industrial/warehouse area. The buildings that were damaged across the street in the blast need to be rebuilt according to their original designs-the parking lot between Church and Bank streets need to be rebuilt according to what was there before the fire in 1985. Once the AT&T building is demolished and relocated old photos and maps need to consulted in order to rebuild what was torn down to make way for the AT&T building.

The city needs to get serious and get serious quick and get local developers involved along with some urban development money if possible.

Nashville has been punched in the gut this year....time to start punching back.

[gman430]

2 hours ago, downtownresident said:

Person/s of interest identified in bombing: 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nashville-bombing-person-of-interest-identified/

You can see the RV on Google Streetview. 115 Bakertown Road. Antioch, TN. 37013.

[BnaBreaker]

16 minutes ago, gman430 said:

You can see the RV on Google Streetview. 115 Bakertown Road. Antioch, TN. 37013.

How do we know that's THE RV in question?

[gman430]

6 minutes ago, BnaBreaker said:

How do we know that's THE RV in question?

Because it was parked at the same apartment the FBI is currently searching and looks exactly like the one on the surveillance camera: 

Edited December 26, 2020 by gman430

[Baronakim]

On 12/26/2020 at 3:36 AM, Nathan_in_the_UK said:

 

Luckily, the odds of an earthquake happening here are lower than west or east Tennessee, but they're not non-existent. In my mind, that's the worst case scenario. Earthquake hits, causes damage to the gear in the building and cuts off the fuel supplies for the back up generators. Much of the emergency services communication and coordination system is now down indefinitely when it's most needed.

 

 

Sorry, your understanding of seismics in mid-America is likely based on outdated data.  As an architect, I have studied this for years.  I have spoken both at times with the heads of TEMA and FEMA, who off the record agreed with my opinion that preparations for earthquakes are woefully inadequate.  Eveyone knows about the New Madrid fault quakes over 200 years ago. However, it is only the southern end of a larger system called the Reelfoot Rift that extends up the Ohio River, then up the Wabash towards Chicago.  This stretch is much longer ovedue for a major release and has the potential to be bigger than those down in Memphis territory.  A similar magnitude quake would devaste St. Louis, Nashville and Chicago.  Serious damage could reach as far as Boston and Washington D.C. too.  It is all about the underlaying strata of bedrock that transmits the force over huge areas.  Unlike California of which its bedrock is very fractured and tends to damp out rather than amplifying the extent of a quake.  In 1810 & 1811, the New Madrid quakes  resulted in extensive liquification due to the bending down of the sedimentary limestone floor of the bedrock to the fault structure itself.  This bending was the result from millions of years ago when the plates of Africa pushed against the larger North American plate, threatening it to fracture into two plates.  This predated the existance, of course, of the Atlantic Ocean.  ProtoAfrica slid away , but the forces created the fault, now called a failed rift and the North American plate remained in one piece.  This also pushed up the eastern part of the plate many thousands of feet.  This would become after millions of years of erosion  (the Tennesse River was larger than the present Mississippi) , the Appalachian Mountains as we know them today.  Back to the Reelfoot Rift.  Nashville's greatest peril is from the rift in the Wabash area, as it is both closer and more impacted by the bedrock strata.  A movement aproximately equal to the 1811 earthquake would IMO mostly destroy St. Louis and Nashville.  Most of the concrete towers we have and are currently building today are vulnerable to pancaking.  The steel framed towers are much more likely to survive.  When the earhquakes in 1810 & 1811 reached Nashville, contemporary descriptions tell that the settlers of the fledgling town of Nashville were knocked off their feeet and could not stand for over 5 minutes.  Stone chimneys collapsed.  Fortunately for them the structural systen of log cabins are particulary earthquake resistant.  To the west though, the deep sediment covering the depressed bedrock caused massive waves of earth like surf from about 50 miles from Nashville to over by Little Rock.  The whole forested area was flattened and semiburied.  Essentially the banks of the Mississippi River moved towards themselves  and flooded most of where Memphis is today within minutes  There are many accounts of what happened on the river, as it was a great transportation highway.  Tales of the river running backwards are a bit extreme but did happen as a large karst cave system up towards the Ohio collapsed.  The river ran backwards until they filled the cavern's hole. In present times, Nashville would suffer great building damage and worse, massive flooding for the failures in the TVA dam system in Tennessee.  When built in 1940s and 50s, there were were studies made by the Core of Engineers.  However, these dams were built for flood control primarily, but eventualy were allowed higher pools for recreational use and the impoundments were much more high than originally intended.  While the concrete gravity dams are likely to remain intact, many of them have long earthen dikes beside them.  With larger pools, you get larger wave action which presumably would wash out these dikes.  This would pretty much cause massive flooding all the way to the Gulf.  Bridges would be down in many cases and pipelines and interstates would be hugely impacted, likewise airport runways.  If a similar quake over towards the Memphis area repeated, I doubt there would be a remaining piece of interstate highway  bigger than a turkey platter from Jackson to Memphis.  One should realize that the level of danger of earthquake damage is only a step down from the eruption of the Yellowstone caldera in terms of damge to US infrastructure.  It is not a matter of IF, but WHEN.  I have argued that earthquake codes are woefully conservative.  I had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Sterns, one of the formost authorites on quakes in the world at the time,  at Vanderbilt many years ago .  He generally agreed that building codes then were very much insufficient, though he was the expert in  sesmics rather than architecture.  In the 1800 quakes, chimneys fell in Washington D.C. and bells in Boston church towers rang from the quake hundreds of miles away.  A similar or greater quake on the northern Reelfoot Rift fault would devaste a huge area of the US and would take decades to repair.  The bombing on Second Avenue on Christmas Day is very minor compared to the damages we could suffer when the big quake finally happens.

Edited December 27, 2020 by Baronakim
spelling, grammar and miscellaneous corrections

[Nathan_in_DC]

2 hours ago, Baronakim said:

Sorry, your understanding of seismics in mid-America is likely based on outdated data.  As an architect, I have studied this for years.  I have spoken both at times with the heads of TEMA and FEMA, who off the record agreed with my oponion thet preparations for earthquakes are woefully inadequate. 

That's why I said less than east or west, but not non-existent.

You're 100% correct though. Most structures in Tennessee weren't built with anything close to what would be adequate standards necessary when another major earthquake hits middle Tennessee. You bring up a great point about the Corps of Engineers projects...the system of CoE and TVA dams in the area are a disaster waiting to happen under the wrong confluence of events. Luckily, they seem to be in better States of repair than the rest of the major infrastructure in the US, at least... but maybe not.

Much of what you said echoes what I learned in some geology classes I took when I was an undergrad at UT years ago. We don't think of middle Tennyas being very geologically active, and compared to east and west it isn't as much, but not as active doesn't mean not active. It just means people are less prepared when something bad does happen.

[markhollin]

My internet/cable were down for 2 days due to water in the line (started before the blast,  on Christmas Eve).  Sure hope everyone who participates in the forum is safe and healthy from the mayhem downtown.  A belated Merry Christmas to all!


 

[LA_TN]

From last night (late):

An update from AT&T on getting circuit restored: Here is the update from AT&T:

The front 1/3rd of their building is structuraly damaged. That includes fiber entry.
They have no power and there is major flooding on all floors including the basement.
The Fire Department is en route with pump trucks to help with the flooding.
They have Building Engineers and Electricians on the way to look into the structure and getting power turned on.
They have 2 850KW generators on the way and 2 1MW generators on standby.
They have new A/C Chillers on the way (Existing Chiller plant was destroyed)

At 6pm (Saturday) 
We where just contacted that temporary power has been restored to the building and they will be trying to power core  equipment in the next few hours

[LA_TN]

Pic courtesy of Alex Apple 

[KJHburg]

what is the main building in the center that collapsed? retail residential or some combo? 

[MLBrumby]

I think that's the buildings a musician named Buck McCoy lived in with other residents. I don't know how many units were affected. Just to the left is The Old Spaghetti Factory, which was a staple on "Market Street" going back to before I was at Vandy. Utterly sad to see all that history destroyed. 

[LA_TN]

12 minutes ago, KJHburg said:

what is the main building in the center that collapsed? retail residential or some combo? 

Pride and Glory Tattoo Palor. Not sure if there was residential above. 172 Second Avenue North 

[BnaBreaker]

good god... that is much worse than I expected... I imagine at least two of those buildings will have to be completely rebuilt... can Nashville catch a damn break already???!

[LA_TN]

A couple more

[BnaBreaker]

7 minutes ago, MLBrumby said:

I think that's the buildings a musician named Buck McCoy lived in with other residents. I don't know how many units were affected. Just to the left is The Old Spaghetti Factory, which was a staple on "Market Street" going back to before I was at Vandy. Utterly sad to see all that history destroyed. 

if i'm not mistaken at think The Spaghetti Factory building is three or four buildings down from there to the right... I'm sure it was probably significantly affected too though.

[MLBrumby]

Oh... maybe so.  It was more in the middle of that block. 

[jmtunafish]

One thing that's puzzled me is this:  with all the security cameras all over downtown and 2nd Ave, did anyone see the driver of the RV get out of the RV once it was parked?  If not, that suggests that it was a suicide bombing, and the officials who went to the guy's house might've been looking for DNA samples and maybe some sort of manifesto or note.  Since he was so careful to make sure that no one was killed or even seriously injured in the bombing (other than himself, presumably), hopefully he left a note explaining why he did what he did.  From things I've heard and read, he wasn't registered to vote and had no social media accounts, so it's doubtful that this was anything political.  To me, it's sounding like it's someone with an ax to grind against AT&T.  At least I sure hope that's all it is.

Edit:  CNN is saying it was a suicide bombing.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/26/us/nashville-tn-explosion/index.html

Edited December 27, 2020 by jmtunafish