|
TSC Crews Repair Outage Today |
|
|
|
Tuesday, 14 July 2009 |
By MIKE BURKHOLDER
Managing Editor
ST. MARYS — A sliced TSC fiber optic cable caused dozens of customers to be without service at one point Monday.
TSC Chief Operating Officer Lonnie Pedersen told The Evening Leader a contractor, who was using a backhoe and digging a sewer line on Wayne Street, cut a fiber optic cable. Pedersen estimated the incident took place at 10:20 a.m. Monday and was first reported at 11:20 a.m. The outage appeared to impact residential customers and a few small businesses in the western portion of the city.
“It was a large, major cable,” Pedersen said, noting the cable had 75 passive optical networks (PONS) and each serves 25 customers. “The good part was the cable was partially cut so initially, it only knocked out 20 PONS.”
Pedersen said crews worked through the night to repair the cable. As a result, there were periodic outages for customers in the area impacted by the repair.
“When we re-spliced the cable, we had to periodically cut them off and on,” Pedersen said. “Even though they were not initially affected, during the restoration they were temporarily cut off to splice the new cable.”
Pedersen said crews finished work on the cable at 7 a.m. today. Most customers, he said, were restored by 10:30 p.m. Monday.
“It is one of the worse,” Pedersen said of cutting a fiber optic cable. “We have a lot buried, about 65 percent is buried. Fiber optic is bulletproof and you usually don’t have noise or water. But I can tell you when a backhoe or anything else gets into it, it is not good.”
Pedersen said crews initially thought they would have to cut the cable in order to repair it. However, an alternate method helped save service for a significant portion of the city.
“We brought in two splicer trailers instead of cutting the cable to restore,” Pedersen said. “We spliced a piece into it at two ends. If we cut the cable, those guys would have been out of service for eight to 10 hours.”
Pedersen thanked TSC crews for working through the night to fix the problem.
“I’m glad they stepped up and they knew we had a restoration job to do and they took care of it,” Pedersen said. |
|
Last Updated ( Tuesday, 01 September 2009 )
|
