Hundreds of hair-thin fiber optic lines are damaged, re-spliced

By Barney Lerten
Bend.com

October 15 — A sleeping transient camped out at a spot near the Bend Parkway apparently knocked over his lantern late Thursday night, sparking a brushfire that melted and damaged BendBroadband’s fiber optic lines running overhead, knocking out TV and high-speed Internet service to thousands of customers for much of the day Friday.

The fire was reported at 11:45 p.m. between the Empire Avenue offramp from the northbound parkway and the Burlington Northern Railroad tracks, said BendBroadband (www.bendbroadband.com) spokesman Lance Judd, citing police reports. Four fire trucks were dispatched at the time, but the blaze apparently smoldered and rekindled, and crews were called out again shortly after 3 a.m., Judd said.

The outage hit at least 5,700 of BendBroadband’s almost 30,000 subscriber households, mostly in the southern and northwest areas of town. It also affected numerous businesses and some major customers that also use the firm for Internet phone services, including the city of Bend and its departments, as well as Deschutes County 911 (which has a backup communications system). Many other city workers used their cell phones as backup, including the fire department.

There was some fluctuation and impact on most if not all customers during the day. „As we pull out damaged strands, that number is going to fluctuate,“ Judd said. „We probably have to sever certain fiber strands and reconnect them.“

Fire inspectors said the transient awoke to the flames and tried to extinguish them, suffering some burns to his feet, before going to call 911 from a pay phone.

Cable-company crews were dispatched to the scene and got to work in the wee hours with the delicate, dust-sensitive task of splicing together about 400 of the light-carrying fiber optic lines, each as thin as a human hair. Two tents were erected to protect the fibers from the thick dust along the busy parkway, as two BendBroadband crews worked as quickly as possible to restore service.

The first priority, completed by midday, was to reconnect the 72 fiber strands involving those large business and municipal customers, followed by the residential lines, which were being restored during the afternoon. The south Bend neighborhood of Foxborough, for example, lost cable TV and cable-modem service around 9:15 a.m. and had it restored around 2:45 p.m., a 5 ½-hour outage.

Businesses that host Websites were the hardest hit, such as Webformix, where Eric Ozrelic, said, „We have major Web hosting clients that demand very, very high up-times – and we hear about it when they don’t.“ It was a roller-coaster day for Ozrelic and those clients, as the service was restored around 11 a.m., only to go down again around 2:45 p.m.

Down at the Bend Public Library, which has 25 public-access Net terminals on the second floor, people early on were hanging out, „hoping it’ll come back up,“ said branch Co-Manager Kevin Barclay.

Since the outage happened on a Friday, he said, „Maybe it’s convinced some people to take a three-day weekend. It’s a beautiful day – probably the last one for a while.“ On the other hand, said Michael Gaston, Deschutes Public Library director, „It does quiet down that floor. It’s sort of a different experience, not to have 25 people clicking away there.“

But businesses with another high-speed option were unscathed by the woes, including at least two local real estate firms that subscribe to DSL (digital subscriber line) service. „We haven’t had a problem,“ said a call-taker at John L. Scott Realty.

BendBroadband official Ray Spreier praised the repair crews for their quick work but said, „I don’t now if it’s our year or what.“ Earlier, he said, a dove hunter shot the fiber line to Redmond, and a contractor dug up and cut an underground line in Redmond.

This time, the delicate work was speeded up considerably by „slack“ purposely left in the fiber lines, which allow crews to do one splicing operation, rather than having to sever the line in two places, around the damaged section, and splice it in both locations.

The incident was reminiscent of several phone-service outages in past years, such as a 2001 incident in which a backhoe operator east of Portland, who failed to call a line-locating service, dug up and severed a key fiber optic line, knocking out long-distance service to the eastern two-thirds of the state (www.bend.com/AR-1083). That was before Qwest completed a fiber-optic „ring“ around the region that allows rerouting of calls, should one spot be severed (www.bend.com/AR-6720).