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From: wb8foz@mthvax.cs.miami.edu (David Lesher)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Some Realities About Repair of Damaged Aerial Telephone Cables
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Date: 18 Mar 91 23:34:59 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 216, Message 3 of 10


{John and Larry discuss a fire damaged cable repair}

I have to side with Larry on this one. Pre-breakup, I was in charge of
35+ leased pairs of various types into a facility.  While outages on
one or two was a regular daily occurance, one night at midnight I got a
frantic call from the shift operator.

He was on the last of four POTS lines, and the ground on one side of the
pair was VERY obvious ... he reported that he had a board full of
failures, and both (60 ma. loop) ASR-28's were "running open," too.

I quickly (before the last pair died - a few minutes later) reminded
him to use the 156 mhz radio as needed, and had him drive down the
cable route to find the problem. He called me on the air to report a
tool shed on fire under the trunk.

Through some miracle, I got the 611-droid to wake up the Cable foreman
for the area. After several attempts, I got the one for the correct
district ;-}. (The others went back to sleep.) [If you REALLY want to
know - it was the 28 cable in the Shadyside CO]

I went out too, and Ma *did* start on the repairs after the power
utility got the 13.2 kv and 230 v stuff fixed. It was a real mess. The
fire had been at a corner pole, and had wiped out a splice cap, too. A
four man crew, or maybe more, worked until late that afternoon. It was
a little easier, I recall, because my repeated harpings on failures
had at least forced Cable to keep the records up to date;-}

What you REALLY want to do, John, is just get a SLC-96 installed in
your basement ;^]. Then, next fire, all they would have to do is run
some new fibers.


wb8foz@mthvax.cs.miami.edu   (305) 255-RTFM