Ex-cop: Holborn fireball comms outage cover for £200m bling heist gang Last Wednesday's blaze in Holborn, which knocked out power and internet access across London, could have been sparked by thieves pulling a daring heist to pocket £200m in precious stones and metals. "I think that probably was deliberate," John O’Connor, former head of Scotland Yard's Flying Squad told capital radio station LBC …
but maybe close enough?
El Reg's original report noted that services across London were affected and "Holborn is home to a BT switching station".
OTOH, this is all premised on a comment by a retired cop who has never heard of an electricity network fire that large. I don't think he's lying, but would he have heard of it? I mean, it would be a bit more meaningful if a power network manager (or whatever) said they'd never heard of a fire that size. If a network engineer said he'd never heard of a diamond theft that big, no-one would pay much attention because her/his expertise isn't in that field...
You do realize that they can easily knock out mobile traffic too.
Not to mention that the nearby antennas for cell communication also use the same BT lines..
So if you knock out a large enough area in terms of power and cell towers, and then knock out the local cell traffic with a blocker... You've pretty much shut that avenue down...
Of course this is redundant because they took out the alarm system too.
This would only leave radio as an option, but that too can be jammed to a point.
Fun theory, but it's hardly 'nearby'. Other end of High Holborn, and beyond.
On the Internet, there isn't such a thing as distance. Only ping times and latency :).
I think the theory has merit, though, it's *exactly* because it's not next door that it makes sense - you wouldn't want to have the emergency services on top of you when you're pulling off a heist like that, you want them elsewhere engaged.
But for the moment it remains a theory AFAIK - I haven't seen anything tie the two together other than timing.
This post has been deleted by its author
"Looks like it may have been started by someone smoking dope down there..."
Sure if they were smoking thermite.
Once you get it started, you can't put it out. Not too terribly complicated, although you need to get the mix right otherwise it goes boom or doesn't work. This would burn through almost everything.
Our experience with copper thieves is that they know exactly what they are doing. They will strip out all the earth and neutral copperwork, leaving all the live stuff in place. The supply will stay on, and you only know about it when a fault occurs and the protection does not work as expected because you have compromised earth and neutral lines.
Because of the energy available in HV distribution circuits, it would be difficult to cause a fault that does not either kill you in the resulting fireball, or simply trip remote protection resulting in a power cut but no fire.
1. There may well be no seperate earth. Likely the cabling is PME (protective multiple earth) where the neutral is tied to earth at regular intervals and is used as the earth return.
2. Provided the phases are balanced (identical loads) there will be nothing whatsoever happening in the neutral. In practice that's almost never the case of course, but the currents should be orders of magnitude less than the phases. Also the neutral will be at about earth potential, so "safe"* to hanlle in a live system. For PME the multiple earth bonding required will probably mean that the mass of earth will quite happily take the residual current.
* For pikey definitions of "safe". Just hope a phase doesn't drop out eg because a digger hunks up a cable oranother bunch of pikeys cuts the wrong cable or gets greedy and tries to nick the lot at the same time.
As an aside, I remember when I was working at Macaroni Comms at Writtle we had an intermittant camp behind the site. The council decided to stick a couple of heavy timber posts in to deter access. They did decide to plant 'em deep. Anyways, about four feet down the engineering team found a salt glazed pipe in the way...
Cue large digging spike. <<FLASH>>.(11 kV). He survived. Power went out at some point and the site went over to genny. Over lunch I went out to have a look. There were burn marks at the top of the hole and below, but no spike. Apparently he went back down to retreive the spike cue <<FLASH>> and the loss of power. He survived again.
Darwin is cruel sometimes.
Quite easily. It's a three phase supply, there is no requirement for a neutral. The cable sheath and/or screen will be grounded, either at both ends (solid bond) or at one end only (single point bond). The circuit will still work if the ground is missing but the induced voltage in the sheath would rise to potentially lethal levels. (There's cross bonding as well, which is something different to what gets referred to as cross bonding in domestic wiring, but that's a special case of single point bonding).
This circuit being elderly oil-filled cables means that once the fault occurred there would be a nice source of fuel to feed the fire. (Not sure if it's a multicore cable or three cables in trefoil formation)
I believe it does still very much exist. "The Flying Squad is a branch of the Specialist, Organised & Economic Crime Command within London's Metropolitan Police Service. The Squad's purpose is to investigate commercial armed robberies, along with the prevention and investigation of other serious armed crime."
It does sound like something from a movie... since the thieves entrance had to be planned well in advance. I guess the unanswered question for now is: coincidence or planned mayhem? I suppose it's not too farfetched to think it the fire was planned IF the crooks had knowledge of the power/phone and internet cabling and that was a critical junction point.
Being in a movie doesn't necessarily make something a bad idea (although it often does, in fairness, but it's correlation, not causal).
I'd day plausible - if doddery old Fingers McMetal was looking for scrap, what's the cost of sending him down Holborn on the right weekend? He fucks up comms whilst he's there, it may affect alarms, which can only be a good thing for you. If he blows himself up, even better, you don't have to pay him the few grand you promised. Put another way, you're about to do a nine-figure blag, why not stack the cards in your favour with something that can only count in your favour?
Does anyone else think this sounds like a cliched movie script? If this is really how it went down then you have to take your hat off to the sheer audacity and imagination of these guys.
Though I hasten to add that they deserve locking up forever given the staggering amount of damage the could have caused and the lives they put at risk.
Never mind Hollywood, it instantly reminded me of the plots of two quite watchable British heist films:
In "Sexy Beast", the crims use the premises of a Sauna to drill through the wall of the pool into the bank vault next door.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0203119/?ref_=nv_sr_1
In "The Bank Job", the crims rent a shop next to the bank and tunnel from the basement down into underground tunnels running below the vault and then up through the vault floor. The police are tipped off briefly visit the outside of the locked vault while the heist is in progress.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0200465/?ref_=nv_sr_1
In the first film, water flooding into the vault from the pool when they break through the wall - disabling the security system and allowing the heist to be carried out.
In the latter film, the bank's alarm is out of action, making the heist possible - which chimes with the point of this Reg article...
OK, but how would this incident have helped their heist? As far as I understand it was too far away to cause any noise to drown out the sound of their own activity, people in the area of the heist weren't evacuated, and as for tying up the emergency services - really? I can't see the Met not responding to a phone call or alarm activation because they maybe had a couple of their cars busy a bit further away with a road closure?
First of all was the fire quite some distance from Hatton Garden. Over a kilometre as the crow flies and considerably longer by road. They are not even in the same district.
Second of all, the fire was on Wednesday while the crims are thought to have started on Friday because the vault would have been open on Thursday as usual.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
