Cable mix-up may be to blame in phone outage

By Johnny Brannon
Advertiser Staff Writer

A severed cable that knocked out telephone service for 200,000 customers Thursday may have been misidentified during maintenance work, according to state phone service provider Verizon Hawaii.

"Basically, we were upgrading some equipment and a technician was removing cable that was not in service and inadvertently cut one that was in service," Verizon spokeswoman Ann Nishida said.

The gaffe triggered the state's worst telephone disruption since Hurricane 'Iniki toppled dozens of telephone polls on Kaua'i in 1992. The company is still trying to determine whether the technician or others were responsible, and whether procedures should be changed to ensure there are no similar accidents.

"We're certainly going to work on improving the processes to prevent future occurrences," Nishida said.

"We are taking this very seriously and are going to make sure it doesn't happen again. It shouldn't have happened in the first place."

Though the fiber optic cable was destroyed with a single snip, repairing the damage was far more difficult, she said, and that is why it took most of the day to restore service to affected parts of O'ahu and Maui.

Unlike copper telephone cables of the past, the severed cable was made of 200 hair-like glass strands. Each strand had to be stripped of a coating, fused back in place at each end by a machine, and tested to ensure that pulses of laser light passed through freely.

"It's not like you snap a big cable in. It's one by one," Nishida said.

The accident at the company's Kalihi central office left about 120,000 customers without phone service for most of the day in Kalihi, Kailua and other O'ahu neighborhoods. Some 80,000 Maui customers lost long-distance service but were able to complete calls on that island.

Many cellular phones were also impacted because they rely on landlines that are connected to towers that receive their signals, Nishida said. Other types of equipment using phone lines were cut off, such as fax machines, ATMs and computer Internet connections.

Thursday's disruption was rare in that it occurred at the telephone company's own facility and was caused by its own personnel. A more common occurrence is for a construction crew to sever an underground cable while working on a project.

In May, about 3,500 Verizon customers lost telephone service in Hawai'i Kai for six days when a contractor sliced cables while doing excavation work. Thousands of AT&T long-distance customers lost telephone service in 1999 for several hours after a construction crew severed a cable in Pearl City.