Shaw Court on fire

[Daradon]

Originally Posted by bizaro86

Did people actually do that? What a bunch of morons. You don't call 911 as an experiment to see if they're there, it's for legitimate emergencies.

edited to add: I'm pretty sure my shaw phone line came with some sort of disclaimer about 911 during power outages and whatnot.

I am 99% sure it does, I think the tech told me that when he set everything up.

[cam_wmh]

Originally Posted by Slava

OK, so what's the solution? I told you my limitation right off the hop, but you just take that and reinforce it. I might be in that small minority that thinks that making sure that services like 911 and AHS should be accessible in an emergency, regardless of whether I can tell you how that should be made possible.

There's enough people speaking heavy in opinion and light in knowledge. I'd prefer not to pollute the thread, and be judged an idiot, and instead read conjecture from those that actually have a semblance of what's going on.

[Resolute 14]

Originally Posted by Slava

Well the sensationalism is definitely a factor and I probably fell victim to that to an extent. When I heard on the radio that they advised people to have their neighbour call 911 for them if they needed it though, I had to laugh.

Counterintuitive as it is, the news report was helpful. If you are a Shaw customer with an outage, but your neighbour is on Telus, they may be able to get through.

As far as redundant backups go, as I said, I would bet AHS does have alternatives for critical systems. But from an IT perspective, this was a catastrophic event and right close to being the worst case scenario (namely, building burning down).

From my company's perspective, we have full tape backups of every server we have at Shaw and those tapes are stored at a third location. While we hope our systems will recover with only a little bit of massaging (we already know the hardware is likely fine, it's the data integrity we are concerned with), we are also sourcing additional servers at our other data centre and will restore from those backup tapes if necessary. In our case, we should be fully recovered from a near-worst-case-scenario in less than 36 hours.

From Shaw's perspective, I can only speculate: Shaw Court was not built by Shaw, and was not originally intended to be a data centre. In fact, only a few floors (3-5, iirc) serve that role. the remaining floors are office space. For that reason, they simply won't have the kind of fire suppression systems that either Q9 or their new data centre will. Nor would it be logical for several reasons - namely cost and the rapid death of any poor office worker who doesn't get out fast enough.

Shaw probably felt they had things covered with their backup system. As you noted though, poor engineering of that backup was a pretty major screw up. But, given you can't really flood your building to test, I suspect they thought they were covered for this type of emergency. Is anybody really surprised they failed to anticipate the fire suppression system knocking out the backup generator? Regardless, it is going to cost Shaw millions. I suspect a lot of other data centres across Canada and North America are going to look at what happened here and reevaluate their own set ups.

[MotoRacer]

The hospital process is the systems they run on. The hospital process is not working right now. This is kind of a big deal.

Patient care is affected despite what the media says.

[ken0042]

Originally Posted by bizaro86

Did people actually do that? What a bunch of morons. You don't call 911 as an experiment to see if they're there, it's for legitimate emergencies.

On the 11:00 news on Global they were asking people to stop calling to see if they were there. They then added that if you have a legitimate emergency and get a "fast busy signal", to hang up and call right back.

I can see a person who lives with somebody with special medical needs wanting to make sure. Yes, it's a little self serving. In fact though I have often wondered why there isn't a "911 test" number that you can call. More so for teaching your kids about calling 911.

[Hockeyguy15]

Originally Posted by MotoRacer

The hospital process is the systems they run on. The hospital process is not working right now. This is kind of a big deal.

Patient care is affected despite what the media says.

How so? No offense but just because I say the sky is yellow that doesn't make it true.

Are people not being seen by doctors? If all that is happening is people have to fill out some forms I'm not too worried about it.

[MotoRacer]

Originally Posted by ken0042

I can see a person who lives with somebody with special medical needs wanting to make sure. Yes, it's a little self serving. In fact though I have often wondered why there isn't a "911 test" number that you can call. More so for teaching your kids about calling 911.

Really... a test number?

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by Handsome B. Wonderful

Halon does what now?

Halon displaces all the oxygen from the room and the lungs of the people who breathe it, making it impossible for them to get oxygen into their lungs.

I only play a doctor on CP, but I am under the impression that this has the side effect of killing people in a very short time.

[MotoRacer]

Originally Posted by Hockeyguy15

How so? No offense but just because I say the sky is yellow that doesn't make it true.

Are people not being seen by doctors? If all the is happening is people have to fill out some forms I'm not too worried about it.

Nobody is dies caused the system is down... just slowdown in everything in the process. Suddenly what takes an already busy doctor 8 hours to do takes much longer. Response is delayed, things get missed, care is compromised.

You will hear the fallout for days and weeks to come.

[Hockeyguy15]

Originally Posted by MotoRacer

Nobody is dies caused the system is down... just slowdown in everything in the process. Suddenly what takes an already busy doctor 8 hours to do takes much longer. Response is delayed, things get missed, care is compromised.

You will hear the fallout for days and weeks to come.

Sounds like a bit of an over reaction to me. I doubt things are getting missed and care is being compromised because of this.

[ken0042]

Originally Posted by MotoRacer

Really... a test number?

Why- what is the problem with that? As mentioned, I think it would be much better if the first time little Johnny has to call 911 he knows what to expect; as he may be traumatized by whatever emergency he is calling about. If his mom isn't breathing, is it better for him to be sitting there in silence and have the police show up before the paramedics?

It could also be used to train the 911 operators; letting them deal with simulated emergencies.

[Slava]

Originally Posted by cam_wmh

There's enough people speaking heavy in opinion and light in knowledge. I'd prefer not to pollute the thread, and be judged an idiot, and instead read conjecture from those that actually have a semblance of what's going on.

Well I can't tell if you're trying to take a shot at me here (but I suspect you are). I'm just going to say that I have a designation as a Certified Risk Manager though. So while I concede that the technology and how best to structure that isn't known to me, I do know about risk management. That's why I brought that up.

[bizaro86]

Originally Posted by ken0042

On the 11:00 news on Global they were asking people to stop calling to see if they were there. They then added that if you have a legitimate emergency and get a "fast busy signal", to hang up and call right back.

I can see a person who lives with somebody with special medical needs wanting to make sure. Yes, it's a little self serving. In fact though I have often wondered why there isn't a "911 test" number that you can call. More so for teaching your kids about calling 911.

I understand why people are doing it, but they shouldn't.

There are some emergencies where you can't just call back when you get a busy signal. If it's not an emergency, there's no reason to call 911.

[Notorious Honey Badger]

My Mom works at the foothills and surgeries are being cancelled becuase their network is down. This is a massive screw up on Shaws part and shows how bad their network is. Where is the redundancy??

[Top Shelf]

Originally Posted by Notorious Honey Badger

My Mom works at the foothills and surgeries are being cancelled becuase their network is down. This is a massive screw up on Shaws part and shows how bad their network is. Where is the redundancy??

How can this happen, were there not redundancies in place?
We have rigorous systems in place for redundancy throughout our national network which allowed us to contain this incident to small area of downtown Calgary with no in-home disruption across the rest of the country. Due to the nature of this flash fire our generators and back-up generators were both impacted in an unforeseen manner.

From http://www.shaw.ca/

[InglewoodFan]

I'm hearing that Alberta registries won't be up before the weekend. Combine this with the fact that I am signing off on house purchase tomorrow and hoping to take possession Monday, does anyone know if I am screwed if the land title registry is still down?

[Notorious Honey Badger]

Pretty lousy excuse from Shaw. Peoples lives are being affected who aren't even their clients.

[Hockeyguy15]

We get it, you hate Shaw.

[darockwilder]

Originally Posted by ken0042

As for AHS services, this meant that if you went to the hospital they would make you fill out the entire form like they did 10 years ago; instead of asking for your Health Care Number and asking if your address had changed.

What percent of AHS employees do you think were working there 10 years ago to have a functional knowledge of how things "used to be done"?

Believe me, it's not just you filling out a form that is being done by hand. When people become dependent on technology and then it is taken away, even the most adept person will be at some sort of deficit. If you know how things are supposed to work, will everyone else in the chain also know how to perform?

Even when everything is back online all of the hand written orders will have to be entered in the various systems, so it's not going to be a seamless transition back to normal.


It's a lot of extra work for an already stressed system.

[Notorious Honey Badger]

I don't hate Shaw. What gave you that idea? If TELUS did this I'd be just as unimpressed with peoples surgeries being cancelled because they lacked proper redundancies