DSL fail. Vallejo.

[duccio]

Thursday between noon and 4:30PM when I was away in San Francisco, somebody tried to steal a cable off the telephone pole for the copper, right outside the back of my house in the alley. It looks like they chopped it with a hatchet at ground level where it went into an underground pipe, but then got spooked and ran away without cutting the cable again up higher on the pole. If I had been here I would have heard them and taken photos after a 911 call.

When I got home, internet and landline were dead, and I called AT&T. They showed up early Friday and began work. It has taken (so far) a day and a half - round the clock, through the night. There have been a dozen vehicles parked up and down the street and all kinds of rental equipment. They rigged lights to work through the night, they had a big puller machine to pull out and replace the cable from the pipe underground where it goes from the manhole in the street down the alley about 30 yards to the telephone pole, they brought in a big spool of 600 strand cable that is as thick as my wrist... All in all, with 20 workers, a dozen vehicles, cable, working round the clock for a day and a half (weekend, and not finished yet), all the rental equipment, etc., it probably cost at least $100,000 (more I am told) for those flunkie, copper stealers' hachet chops, not to mention all the 600 homes' and businesses' losses and inconvenience without phone and DSL service. (I'm told they struck again in Benicia last night.) Of course I took a few pictures.

WTF!

This guy showed up as supervisor early Friday morning.

Towards evening, they brought in lights - it was as bright as day outside, with quiet generators humming all night long; this all made me kind of anxious. Here are two of the several trucks that lined both sides of the street and blocked the alley. I have not been able to get my truck out of the backyard since they started working.



Here is one of the cool, bright light rental units that they employed through the night.


These two men are splicing the new cable to the underground feed at the manhole (I guess).



These two are up on the lift splicing the wires to the people's houses at the other end of the new cable up the pole. They did this for at least 20 hours. The new cable is that thick curving shape on the left and at the top that goes down into the plastic bag.

It's almost noon Saturday and they are still at it, although most of their equipment and personnel have vanished. The would be thieves are long gone, to strike again tonight - another $100K added to suffering Vallejo's collective phone bill.

Comments

[shinsetsu]

One would think if something is so important, in demand and hard to replace that it would be constructed more protectively to begin with.

[duccio]

The guys told me that the cable had been there since 1938. The thieves like the old ones because the insulation is paper and easier to strip off than the shrunk on plastic insulation on the new cables.

They told me that thieves were continuously taking the cables from the approaches to the Carquines Bridges, so AT&T finally installed underground ones at a huge expense. I ventured the thought that maybe in the long run all the cable would have to be underground. They didn't think that AT&T or Vallejo would ever go to that expense. Then we started talking about wireless being the future and they all seemed to concur that that was the probable solution to the copper theft problem, and in fact, retrieving and selling all the copper from underground cables and the telephone wires on the poles would probably finance universal wireless communications many times over at the same time as increasing the supply of copper and crashing the market price - thus ending the theft from multiple angles.

The AT&T guys worked hard and long hours, but on the occasions I opened conversation with them, they were all of them friendly, interesting, and insightful. It did occur to me later when by myself how vulnerable our communications infrastructure is though. A determined wacko/saboteur group could wreak havoc in a cable cutting spree in just a few hours, taking whole towns, even counties off the grid. This brief and unsuccessful event of attempted cable theft took 600 customers off the communications grid for two and a half days and cost over $100K to fix, and there is already another event in Benicia to contend with that happened last night.