I’m sure Adam will have a much more complete post about the Nashville bombing as soon as facts are more clear. In the meantime, I just want to note that the bomber sure picked an effective target. His apparent intentional and careful targeting of what the Post is calling the AT&T “transmission building” led to a regional telecommunications blackout of pretty impressive proportions. 911, cell and Internet service were affected. The Nashville airport closed for around four hours.
A few years ago I toured a similar facility in Rochester, and it’s an impressive building. It is overbuilt — something like 4 stories tall, but built so heavily that it could have been ~15 (my memory isn’t 100% on that) — lots of brick and concrete. It has redundant generators, steel roll down window shields in the lobby, and 24/7 security. It has to be impressive, because, like the Nashville building, most of the Internet and telephone traffic for the region passed through it (at least at the time I toured it).
I’m not revealing any secrets when I say that every city has a similar building, they’re a pretty important failure point, and they’re generally downtown, facing busy city streets. They probably should be better protected, but I guess we needed to spend our post-9/11 money on turning cops into stormtroopers and giving them armored vehicles instead of hardening these buildings. Another factor must be the almost complete lack of regulation of telecoms once they branched out from land lines into cellular and Internet.