Northwest fiber optic cuts can disrupt but fix is fast
By WILLIAM McCALL
Associated Press
Sunday, September 6, 2009 1:40 AM PDT
PORTLAND — Fiber optic cable is generally reliable and can carry millions of phone conversations, Internet downloads and YouTube videos at the same time.
But just one careless or misplaced lunge with a backhoe shovel can cut off entire towns from phone service or their connection to the Web, as happened recently in a corner of Oregon and Washington state.
A contractor accidentally cut a Qwest fiber optic line last month in Ridgefield, Wash., disrupting some telephone and Internet service across a mostly rural area stretching from Vancouver in southwest Washington to Astoria at the northern tip of Oregon.
One of the most seriously affected towns was Woodland, Wash., where a temporary 911 dispatch center had to be set up at the fire department station when telephone service was cut off to much of Cowlitz County.
Woodland police Chief Rob Stephenson said other fire stations were staffed with volunteers who could radio for help if necessary.
‘‘Luckily, in this event, it was a quiet day for us,’’ Stephenson said. ‘‘As far as we know, nothing got missed.’’
But he said it was not the first time it had happened.
The Telecommunications Industry Association has no figures on the exact number of service breaks across the country because companies are concerned about security and disclosing system designs or potential network vulnerabilities, according to spokesman Mike Snyder.
And a Qwest spokesman said it was unlikely the Denver-based company would know how many people were affected by the Aug. 24 outage in Oregon and Washington. Most of the outage did not affect Qwest customers, and instead was a problem for other phone companies and Internet service providers that were using the fiber cable.
‘‘The only way to know is if you knew all the companies using the fiber and then called all of them and added it up,’’ said Qwest spokesman Bob Gravely, who noted that confidentiality agreements in contracts limits disclosure.
Irv Emmons, who monitors service quality for the Oregon Public Utility Commission, estimated there are perhaps two accidental cable cuts in Oregon every month, with varying effects on service. Most of the cuts are made by contractors who either miss the mark or relied on locators who did not get the mark right in the first place, he said. Other causes include storm damage, careless landowners and occasionally pesky rodents.
More rare is sabotage, which knocked out cell phone, landline and Internet service in California’s Silicon Valley when eight fiber optic cable were deliberately cut in April, including six belonging to AT&T.
In the accidental cut last month in Washington state, a Loy Clark Pipeline Co. crew was digging to install a new pipeline for Northwest Natural Gas.
Rick Matteson, spokesman for MDU Resources Group, the parent company for Loy Clark, said the reason for the mistake was still unclear.
‘‘From what we hear from our crews, it had been marked, and they were following the marking, so we’re going back over the process,’’ Matteson said.
The Bismarck, N.D., company has wide experience in construction and owns a group of utilities, ‘‘so we’re on the receiving end of things too,’’ he said.
But as Matteson and others point out, marking underground lines is not foolproof and ‘‘unfortunately, accidents do happen.’’
Tom Plant, an Oregon State University engineering professor and expert in optical electronics, says repairs to fiber optic lines can be made quickly because a break is easy to locate with light signals if it’s not already obvious, and repairs are simple with the right tools.
‘‘They’re expensive tools, maybe $20,000 to $30,000 for a splicer, but it splices in a few seconds,’’ Plant said.
One way to minimize the impact is to lay redundant cable or build redundancy features into the communications network to re-route service for the area, which industry officials say is the general trend.
‘‘We have the technology in place to make sure customers are not down for long,’’ said Fletcher Cook, an AT&T spokesman. ‘‘We can re-route it pretty quickly when something like that happens.’’
