atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Outside Plant OSP Construction Cut about 50+ underground main phone lines. Need HELP!!!

I was asking because I was curious what the $$$ damages came to from his LEC. Was hoping for an update if all. Like most times I probably didn't word it correctly. My apologies.

only 2 ft deep sounds like it may be a private cable though

I've seen Verizon go both ways on charges. I had a customer here in the Finger Lakes who was expanding the parkinmg lot and his parking lot contractor did not call. I called a Verizon manager that I knew and had it repaired in less than two hours. By right, Verizon should have charged the contractor, but they didn't. Probably had something to do with my friendship with the manager. Or it might have had something to do with the fact that Verizon had run the cable from the pedestal to demarc, but only ran it a couple inches down.

A second scenario came when a Mennonite cut a cable on his property. It was a major cable and it cost him (Verizon too) $800.00. He was definitely bummed! So it is a matter of whom yu know.

I've repaired a few of these cables myself but wouldn't trespass on telco property. In the cases I have repaired cable, it is to an individual subscriber, not a major cable.


Al Dukes

Sorry to keep beating what's probably a dead horse - but I'm with soyons-expositifs on this.... aside from hitting a gas line, it would have been just as easy to have hit a certain rather thick 3 conductor aluminum cable. Assuming he survived that, I don't even want to guess at the cost of fixing it, since splicing isn't an option. Since the power company owns everything up to the meter... and I doubt they'd be interested in using his backhoe for liability reasons, I can easily see the bill in the $1500 - $2000 range, plus whatever fine the power company felt like handing out that day, and possibly plus the cost of a new bucket. All I have to compare it to is the cost of running a new water or sewer line to your house, which usually runs upwards of $7500; of course in that instance you are paying a plumber, not a utility.

And it could have been even worse than that..... high voltage lines run underground (and not all that deep) in the easement on the edge of my property. I wouldn't go anywhere near that area with even a shovel, whether it was marked or not.

I'm not trying to beat up on the guy - just pointing out that he should put aside the cost for a moment and be glad he's still alive; whatever the cost came out to be - I consider him to be very fortunate.

Having said all that, I hope things worked out for him OK.

Underground triplex can indeed be spliced. Here's an NTSB report about how the failure of one of those splices overheated an adjacent gas line resulting in a leak and explosion:

https://ncsp.tamu.edu/reports/NTSB/ntsbPipeReport/PAR0101.pdf

I got a call from one of my regular customers a couple of months ago. Her husband had been trimming back the hedge with electric clippers and had managed to chop a cable where it dropped down the pole to a splice.

They only live two minutes walk from here, so I went round to take a look. Fortunately, it was was only about a 6-pair cable running to a few houses at the end of the road; if he'd hit one of the other drops he'd have cut off the whole road, including himself. Unfortunately, he's one of those people whose first reaction to anything he does wrong is to blame somebody else:

"Shouldn't have put their &@#!%& cable in such as %^!@&* stupid place!"

I managed to get his wife to convince him that being nice to the BT engineer when he showed up would make the repair job much smoother (as would offering cups of coffee, etc. of course!).

Luckily, the cut was relatively close to the splice and there was sufficient slack, so the repair was an easy one-man job only taking a short time. They didn't get billed.

Even the "big guys" get it wrong somtimes. A couple of summers ago road contractors chopped through two 100-pair cables between here and the C.O.