have you guys ever dug around this crap before? i swear the mentality around fiber optics amazes me...you get everyone and their mother out there to watch..they are all very nervous..but you'd think with something sooo very important that they would originally put it in with some care...this particular pipe run consisted of a 18" rcp line to be put in under the fiber line..ending with a catch basin against the toe of the slope..the ground i was digging in was a old fill with..i swear..boulders the size of loader buckets!! talk about a pain trying to fish these things out from under the fiber optic line with out TOUCHING the line!! and the line itself? do you think something that important would be encased in slurry or concrete?..NOOO thay put a couple of concrete sacks on the bottom..dry..and threw a couple on top for good measure..dry also..than sprayed some water on tham to get them to harden..oh yeah, also it ran in a conduit for a little ways than it was direct burial..go figure
wish me luck guys..i start with a new company on monday!!
Good luck! The first day on a new job can be a little stressful.
ohh yea, they are extremely overprotective of fiber optics, I heard one time, to get a repair guy out; it would be 1,000 a minute, and that came from the service dispatcher. You sure can do a lot for 60 grand an hour. The other thing that kills me is when it isn't marked, I saw a company open up two cross country lines that intersected each other, not one was marked before excavation began. Lucky they didn't hit either one of them. Good luck with the new job.
My sentiments exactly! It was almost 30 years ago that we were doing a townhouse project next to one of the major lines going out of Pittsburgh. The only thing that actually had to cross the fiber optic line was one new connection for the water main, and that didn't happen until we'd been on the site for several months. Every time we happened to be anywhere within 100 yards of that line with a backhoe though, somebody from the phone company would stop to warn us it was there. They always told us the same thing--that the fiber line was there, and that it was in conduit. An old conduit, that was made out of wood treated with creosote. Happily for me, the waterline work was done by somebody else, but while the hole was open, I did make a point of getting a look at that line. It looks just like somebody buried an old raiload tie! :cool2 Now, what we were told about that line was that it's the main connection between Pittsburgh and everywhere to the east. It's not the price of the repair man that costs the big bucks, although that supposedly ain't cheap--they said it involved two tractor trailer sized units, and the guys who do the splicing more or less look through microscopes to work with the stuff. The big cost is that the phone company can charge you for all the revenue they lose while the line is out of service. Maybe I heard wrong, or maybe the guy was BSing us, but in 1980 dollars, they told us that one was worth $50,000 a minute...
fibre here in the UK i dig around fibres on a regular basis (weekly) no one bothers us and 99% of the time all tracing of underground utility's is done by myself BT the UK,s main phone line suppler will come out and trace their plant and stand by their tracing :notworthy as i found out working in a town called Bath,the BT engineer came out and spoke with us,we identified the position of our excavations in the road here returned some 10 minutes later to say all was clear we started to jack hammer the first hole out and while scraping through the road base i broke a plastic duct with one sole fibre coming from Bath university ,and yes broke the fibre the problem is you need enough slack on the cable ends to reach into the back of the jointing vans ,this is not possible and the cable length replaced was a 1000 metres ,cost to us nil bollocking to engineer ,extreme and the depth of the duct crossing the road 10 inch,s cheers graham
Yep,been digging around it for 15 plus years..Its a pain in the gonads at the least.. Great pics btw. Forgot to add.We have always been told,"Hit a fiber optic line and it can put the company out of business because of the cost of repair".
fiber I have helped run fiber over hundreds of bridges in this country when Level 3 was putting in their lines coast to coast. It's not the cable that's the issue it's the cost of lost revenue. Most of the time we ran two 6" condits with 12 cables per conduit. revenue can be a million a minute in some places. Watch those lines. Wolf44
Makes sense Wolf.I don`t know anything about fiber optic cable,except to not hit it.I talked to this guy one time with the phone company down in Austin and he told me if you break it here on this site,that they might have to re run the cable miles back to its last junction.Well thats what I understood him to mean. As for me,I tell all my guys be fricking careful if we have fiber optics anywhere in our cut and often times my self I will get on a machine to dig if cuts could possibly get near their cable...
I realise we're talking the world over here, but I have to agree with the original statement by reddot; if f-o cable is sooo important (which it is) why is it not installed in a way that at least offer some mild form of protection over and above direct burial. Why not make it a standard that f-o must be installed inside thick wall HDPE pipe, like gas line. Around these parts, gas line is yellow. Why not put f-o in something like a chartreuse green HDPE conduit. I know this won't make it excavator proof...but there's something scarry about staring at a naked multi-million dollar f-o line in a ditch. My .02.
For new insallations, it sure would make sense to me. I'm sure that in the example I cited above, it was way cheaper to put it in the existing conduit, no matter how little protection it provided. And if the excavator, not the phone company has to foot the bill for the damage and lost revenue, why not? (At least from the phone company bean counters' point of view.) :beatsme (That's not to mention the amount of stuff that's being put in the ground in bored holes--the excavator doesn't even get the advantage of possibly recognizing that he's digging across a pre-existing ditch.) ointhead
No conduit? Pretty common around here. At least other than the orange wrapping on it. Pretty hard to encase it in concrete when it is directional drilled, or in most cases around here plowed in with a dozer pulling a cable plow. At least towards the last of the boom around here, they did start laying a "caution fiber below" tape, but most of the time this is inches above the line. One company I was working for had a project next to the airport in Dayton Oh. We sent 3 utility crews, each with 7-8 guys out on a saturday. Their only job that day was to locate, and expose the fiber line where ever they had a crossing, or were in the area of the line. Reason being was that if any of the lines were to be damaged, it would cost $250,000 a minute for downtime. I guess you never really realize how much that data running through those lines would be worth.
But it cuts so easy! I chopped a small one for a verizon local mux box. Also got local phone and cable all at once. Missed a primary by 8 inches. Best part was I was digging a full shovel length away from every locate mark. Was scratching less than 8 inches deep around a manhole to put a taller ring on. Nobody ever said a word to me but I still have the polaroid of a shovel laying between the hoe bucket and their marks. It was a bad case of follow the leader by the locate people. The worst part was listening to all the housewives bitching cause I cut their soaps off in the middle of the afternoon.
Back in the 80's my dad worked on a dam project and they were told that if they hit the overhead lines, it would cost $1 million per hr. They drove I-beams in the ground and built a headache rack for protection.
So you leaving the green truck boys? Who you going out for now?
preston pipelines
Very nice, they are a good outfitt. One of thier supers, Lenard and I have known each other for twenty yrs or so he a good man, strait shooter. I cleared some right of way for them ealier this spring.
they are quite a bit different than teichert, takes a bit getting used to
I was told that one fiber line, which would be the size of 10lb fishing line, could have up to 300,000 conversations going at the same time. Pretty amazing how it is put in the ground with very little care about finding it later.
I had a guy ask me one time what would happen if he cut one of our fiber cables. I said your leave your machine and truck there and don't bother to go home, because they are all belong to the phone company. He was very cautious after that. Most companies now have two or more routes that the calls can switch to called rings, so it will less expensive if you cut it.
We just worked on a collage project and there was a contractor working on a building next to ours that ripped 3 4" fiber lines clear out of the ground. These belonged to the railroad and connected Seattle area to the rest of the world. They rerouted the info and the splicing crew showed up and was there for three weeks putting that mess back together. I will find out about how much that will cost them soon. We worked the same line and the railroad was there watching every scoop. Then ordered vac trucks for the close stuff.
Last time we had to cross FO the locate guy couldnt figure out where it was so he just marked out a 15 foot wide path and told us we had to hand dig yeah right, luckily for us they at least knew it was encased in concrete so we carefully found it, and guess where it was, just outside of his 15' wide area he marked. I'm with everyone else, if it is so important it they should at least be able to locate it.
Why, cause you hit the "fiber optics on vasco rd."?:lmao Just Kidding!
I agree. If our locators can't find it we will dig it up with your equip(or ours if you want to wait) show it to you and stay until the danger of cutting it is gone.
I was out on a machine repair job a bunch of years ago where they were putting in deep sewer pipe. There was an intersection of underground power, sewer, television cable and a trunk fiber line. I hadn't seen so many hard hats peering into a trench in my life. What I had heard about the cost of the initial install on the fiber was the phone companies put every dollar they had into getting the cable in the ground that they went broke and were bought up by other companies. There was no government help and all the telecom companies jumped on the technology bandwagon so fast they didn't see the black hole underneath. I do take the point though that I should never trust the people marking the lines. Since fiber has no metal in it, is there anyway to find it if not mapped or marked?
There is usually a tracer wire burried with the line that they hook their locater to, same as the gas companies do with their plastic lines.
I have exposed thousands of feet of it. It was after the last big earthquake (in LA) and when the I-5/I-14 interchange fell down (again) the main arttery between LA and Palmdale was severed (transportation wise). The railroad was bought up by Metrolink and had to be upgraded from freight to passenger train specifications(can't have very sharp turns so speeds can be higher). This required a lot of realignment of the curves. Most major fiber runs are along the RR ROW because it's the cheapest way to install. If you thought a big dozer cable plow had some power, take a look at a train mounted plow. The stuff I had to dig up was direct bury. Cable was about as thick as your pinky. It was nerve racking to say the least. That orange stuff in the phots is called inter duct. It is usually used to put multiple cables into existing duct work. I would have been very happy to have seen that over the fiber that I was digging up, as it can't bend as sharply as direct bury cable. Most of the propaganda about cost is just that. Phone companies have to reroute the data and they don't want to. They also want all there lines to be defect free. As far as locating goes, I can't see why there would be a problem. The insulator can be made with a metal sheild (used to give strength for pulling and varmint protection). The first time I saw fiber cable first hand was near the cement plant between California City and Tehachapi. Sprint called us out to dig up and lower a direct bury fiber cable that they thought was in danger from the county road crews during their normal bar ditch maintenance. Boy, they were right. At the location we were asked to dig the county had placed some temp. asphalt in the ditch (maybe to keep it from rutting?). I started excavating to remove the temp. (hand digging was to commence once we got to the bottom of the temp.) by just scratching a little bit at a time. We found the cable before the shovels even got dirty. I scratched the sheeth. No damage to the fiber, but the outer plastic (or vinyl or whatever it is) was peeled back a bit. You could see a metal sheild in the cable. If I remember it was a spiral wound copper colored sheild. Anyway, the sheild can be used for locating.