Imagine having a city-wide aerial and underground Hybrid-Fiber Coax network, a network that has grown over many years to serve a growing southern college community with Internet, Telephone, on-demand Video and Television services. A network composed of a dense Fiber-optic backbone and Coaxial infrastructure strung on utility poles throughout your community; thousands of miles of fiber cable, coaxial cable, hundreds of thousands of drop-lines, amplifiers, powersupplies, splitters, enclosures, poles, pedestals … Next, imagine a ½ mile-wide bulldozer plowing through the heart of that community; unstoppable, infinitely powerful, destroying with abandon! A random 5 mile stretch of total destruction! The bulldozer is imaginary, an analogy. The rest of the story is fact. Swap the bulldozer with an F5 tornado and cut to the aftermath: a team of Telecom veterans left to pick up the pieces and help a community begin to move life back towards normal.

Rainbow Design Services, Inc. as an OSP Design and Build Planning contractor to the Cable and Telecommunications Industry was asked in the days following tornado outbreak in the southern-US to help a major Comcast system with assessing damage and planning for system restoration. On April 27th, 2011, a large tornado outbreak destroyed thousands of homes and took many lives in the town of Tuscaloosa Alabama. The storm, later classified as an F5 tornado cut a path nearly 5 miles long and over 1/2 mile wide across the college town, and in doing so not only destroyed homes and businesses, but also damaged and destroyed outside plant (OSP) facilities owned by Comcast. Comcast's head-end facilities reside on the south-side of the storm path, and a large percentage of its served customers reside north of the storm path, the storm in fact destroyed primary and backup Fiber routes serving the system.

 Tuscaloosa - Pre-Tornado Imagery

 Tuscaloosa - Post-Tornado Imagery

Rainbow Design Services has provided Engineering Services to many regions of Comcast for years -- and in most cases provides extension, design, system mapping and new-build planning among many other offerings. Rainbow was contacted on Thursday April 28th in the hours following the tornado, requested to provide onsite resources as quickly as possible.  When Rainbow Sr. Manager Mike Traughber arrived in Tuscaloosa the afternoon of Sunday May 1st (3 days later), the extent of damage was shocking, but the team was anxious to apply new technologies and approaches embedded in GIS & Engineering to help rapidly assess damage and build plans for restoration.

Although by the time Rainbow arrived Comcast already had field teams driving in accessible areas to visually assess damage -- the re-constituted team had some new ideas to try; first, everyone involved was pleased to discover that Google had been rapidly updating its Google Map service with fresh satellite imagery for the affected areas. The team was able to gather network maps in various versions of Bentley and other tools (Focus, Bentley Comms, MicroStation etc.) and combine these various formats into a single format. Once this was accomplished, the team took Google Map satellite imagery and converted it for overlay in Bentley Comms. In doing so, imagery from before the storm as well as after was imported and layered on top of the Tuscaloosa system prints (strand, address data, RF, Fiber maps etc) so everyone involved with the project could visualize the network before the storm and after. The continued visual assessment field trips gave everyone a very good idea about the radius of damage relative to the storm path. Using this input, the team was then able to identify graphically not only the storm path across the system, but also a “total damage” buffer (shown in yellow below), inside these buffers all facilities were a total loss and would need complete re-design and re-construction.

Next, Bentley Comms was used to create Bills-of-Materials (BoMs) to generate reports for calculating the number of homes passed, homes lost, mileage of cable destroyed, device inventories and more. The team was able to generate highly accurate BoMs due to the fact that Bentley Comms, in modeling the OSP network, provides that all devices, facilities, enclosures, poles, pedestals, amps, taps, power supplies etc be fully modeled in the background database.  Each BoM can be sorted by area, by node, by device type etc. Using the resulting BoMs, Comcast executives were able to quickly assess damage cost, replacement costs and with new design applied, determine re-build construction cost. These reports also helped Comcast management make decisions about potential upgrades, determine what equipment was already in-stock or needing ordering, and make critical decisions about what to build in what order.

In the final assessment, more than 40 nodes were affected and roughly 50 running miles of plant required complete rebuild.  It is estimated that efforts were reduced from a 45+ days down to roughly a 10 day effort (80% reduction) by employing these new techniques and use of GIS solutions (Bentley, Google etc). Naturally reconstruction efforts continued past these dates, but answering the key questions “How much damage did the system receive?” and “How much is restoration going to cost?” happened much more quickly than in past efforts.

According to Mr. Kurt Spence (OSP Engineer for Comcast), “You guys really see the big picture, quickly … the ability to come in with little notice to quickly assess and identify problems and solutions, simply amazing!” Mr. Spence is a Comcast employee recruited from a nearby Comcast system to contribute to the Assessment efforts. It is further estimated that the tools and processes employed in these efforts enabled re-build construction planning to start in a matter of days vs. weeks (50%+ savings in time), and that the overall project to re-establish services to Tuscaloosa was ultimately completed at least a month ahead of initial estimates (reducing overall timelines by more than 50%). Another very positive side-effect was that during restoration a great deal of node segmentation and cascade reduction was completed – improving overall system design.

Comcast staff was immensely appreciative of our efforts, and are putting contingency plans in  place with Rainbow Design Services to ensure services of this type are more readily available, and that the processes used in this effort are well documented so they can be readily repeated should unfortunate need arise again. Rainbow Design Services remains very appreciative of the opportunity to work with the Tuscaloosa system, and to apply our GIS and Engineering knowledge to such a serious and public problem.




Please contact our technical sales team for more information. We are excited to talk about your plans for the future, and in partnering with you for unparalleled success.  Email us at sales@rainbowdesign.net.