In February of this year, the city of Petrópolis, in the Mountain Region of Rio, was severely affected by heavy rains. The tragedy devastated the Imperial City: it left more than 200 dead and thousands of people homeless, and is already considered the largest ever recorded in the municipality.

In addition to the unprecedented damage to the population, the rains in Petrópolis also caused the rupture of optical cables, which jeopardized the city's communication with the outside world. The Petrópolis Metropolitan Network (Remep), operated and maintained by RNP, had 60% of its infrastructure affected, which left local teaching and research institutions without Internet access for several days.

Among them, the National Laboratory of Scientific Computing (LNCC), which houses the SDumont supercomputer, central node (Tier-0) of the National High Performance Processing System (SINAPAD) and considered one of the largest supercomputers in Latin America, vital for the continuity of scientific research that needs high processing capacity.

Since the rupture of the optical cable in several points of the network, registered at the beginning of the rains, on 2/15, RNP's Network Engineering team worked incessantly to resume connectivity to the LNCC, reestablished a week later, on 2/22.

The result was a RNP, K2 Telecom and GO Telecom joint effort, partners in the transport connection and maintenance of the Petrópolis metropolitan network. In addition to the LNCC, the network also serves a campus of the Fluminense Federal University (UFF), CEFET, the Catholic University of Petrópolis (UCP), the City Hall and the Imperial Museum.

“Since the event took place, RNP has mobilized together with Go Telecom and K2 Telecom to access the city, assess the damage and implement emergency network recovery actions, without putting the teams at risk. We followed the guidelines of the Civil Defense and City Hall and, when we were allowed access, we spared no effort to return to communication with all institutions”, says the director of Engineering and Operations at RNP, Eduardo Grizendi.

According to RNP's Network Engineering, the recovery of the entire Petrópolis Metropolitan Network is still partial and will take place in the medium term, due to the catastrophe that occurred in the city, so connectivity to other institutions has not yet been fully reestablished.

In addition to the emergency actions for partial recovery of optical cables, one of the mitigation actions was the activation of a radio link for resilience. Another action was the emergency contracting of a 1 Gb/s link, which will serve as redundancy to guarantee connectivity to user institutions until the network is fully recovered.