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Fl. County Halts FTTP Until Installation Is Safer
celerityfm writes "Warning: Deploying Verizon's new Fiber To The Premises (FTTP, see previous) in YOUR neighborhood may involve geysers of raw sewage spewing onto your front yard or sinkholes opening and swallowing moving vehicles. Well, Hillsborough County, host to one of the first FTTP trial sites, has ordered Verizon to stop deployment of FTTP until they can figure out how to stop creating sinkholes that open up under minivans with children inside. No word on whether SBC is having similar problems with their fiber roll-out."
First Sinkhole.
>> Warning: Deploying Verizon's new Fiber To The Premises (FTTP, see previous) in YOUR neighborhood may involve geysers of raw sewage spewing onto your front yard or sinkholes opening and swallowing moving vehicles.
Still sounds like a pretty fair deal to me!
This takes incompetence to a whole new level. I mean, its just a cable. I've installed lots of local and wide area networks without hitting even one sewer line.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Verizon: Delivering the wrong sort of fiber.
thank God! We didn't want Joe Q Public running their own unpatched IIS servers, did we?
figure out how to stop creating sinkholes that open up under minivans with children inside.
Well that's easy, drive your kids around in a different type of car, like an SUV.. problem solved!
I've had all that happen at my house, and I still don't have fiber! That just isn't fair.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
until they can figure out how to stop creating sinkholes that open up under minivans with children inside.
Luddites.
next on news 10, more sh!t than usual with your internet connection...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's called DigSafe. I just learned this is a New England (sans CT) thing- what the hell do the rest of you do?
These guys have scoped out my lot two times in the past month, due to the start of a new addition, an (unrelated) emergency oil cleanup...
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
Large scale deployment of fiber is quite likely to lead to "geysers of raw sewage" if not properly contained.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Verizon Fiber - Catch The Wave!
has ordered Verizon to stop deployment of FTTP until they can figure out how to stop creating sinkholes that open up under minivans with children inside.
For access to reasonably priced, unmetered high-speed internet access, minivan swallowing sinkholes is an evil that I am perfectly willing to face.
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain,
or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
The real cause of these events, as yet unobserved, can only be the Devil. You see, about 6 years ago, the Great Destroyer attempted to get DSL installed in his humble abode, told that he was more that 5000m from a C.O. His wrath is just now becomming clear as the Horned Goat himself is now eating up babies.
Maybe I'm missing the point here, but don't they have these problems with any kind of underground infrastructural deployments in certain areas? I thought this has more to do with geology than with contractor ineptitude.
Ok, hitting sewer lines is bad, but in theory, before any dig, the local utilites (including sanitation) would come and mark the ground so that this wouldn't happen. But sinkholes? Aren't those things opening up all over Florida all the time anyway? I thought it had to do with the geological makeup of the soil in the area and the lack of firm bedrock, more than bad digging. Not that digging wouldn't exacerbate the problem.
Seems to me the county wouldn't have much room to complain if they hadn't accurately marked underground lines before digging begins, as is usually the law (in every place i've lived anyway.) Also seems like if they did do this, then Verizon's contractors got some 'splainin to do.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
... we have something called Miss Utility in the MD/VA/DC/DE area. Each member utility is notified and marks their pipes/wires/whatnot, and then you're not at fault if you bust something that wasn't marked.
Generally, some fella with a metal detector comes strolling through, putting a bunch of fluorescent orange paint stripes on the ground to indicate the general direction/location of underground wires.
We've only ever had cable/power/tv lines marked on our property, and nothing's been damaged during two septic tank repairs, one new well and two additions. I guess PVC would be a little harder, but this is absolutely ridiculous!
I wonder how many Verizon lines have been disrupted as a result of these guys?
As if the internet infecting your computer wasn't enough, Verizon is working on a way to infect you.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
More fiber causes more sewage?
More fiber delivers more spam?
More fiber sucks away more time?
Actually, the fiber is being installed underground. When the drilling punctures a water or sewer line, the leaking liquid can cause problems several ways. A puddle of sewage on the surface has several undesirable characteristics. Water or sewage leaking through earth can dissolve various materials and carry them away, creating a space. If this space is on the surface and small, it is a pothole. If this space is under the surface, when the unsupported earth above collapses that is called a sinkhole.
Sinkholes come in various sizes, and since the surface layer and "rock" supporting much of Florida can be dissolved fairly easily, large sinkholes can be created all too easily. A small sinkhole which collapses under a car can cause several dramatic situations.
It would be far faster, it would be far cheaper than digging trenches, and it would be fair easier to pop a fitting inside the house to extract the fiber from the incoming pipe than digging an entire trench!
They have knowledge but they don't have wisdom.
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
Because if I can crawl out of a sewage filed sinkhole and download new Slackware ISO's in under a minute, you may have yourself a deal.
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
until they can figure out how to stop creating sinkholes that open up under minivans with children inside.
Good, killing two birds with one stone. I thank Verizon for helping remove more soccer-mom-driven minivans from the road. And as for the children... maybe now I can go seen a R rated movie without having some kid crying up and down the isles.
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
Fiber is not affected by electrical interference, as it is an optical transmission. This isn't a bad idea, outside the fact that the point of the fiber is so people don't need phone lines.
The reason they can't just go over phone lines is most likely that phone lines are burried shollow and unprotected. Whereas the fiber would most likely buried deeper in a protective conduit. So to burry over the phone line would require burrying under the phone line.
sinkholes that open up under minivans with children inside
:o)
How exactly does one engineer a sinkhole that knows whether or not there are children inside a minivan?
Ye gads - intelligent sinkholes!
Cue the "new sinkhole overlords" jokes.
This is probably a great deal for the diggers; the cost of paying the county to fix the breaks is probably less than preventing them. Therfore, the only stick that the county has is to say STOP! No more digging until you clean up your act!
I'm local to Hillsborough and all day we've been hearing about this stoppage. Sinkholes are a buzz word because they are a (forgive the pun) a money pit for insurance companies. Potholes, ditches and everything else where the ground is unlevel can be dubbed as sinkholes. That is not to say we don't have sinkholes, but nowhere near as many as are reported. It is a large enough problem that some zip codes are blocked out of renters insurance due to sinkhole problems, but Verizon hasn't been running around and draining pockets of the water table. The real headline should be: Verizon has morons digging trenches.
blame me!
I know that I personally always keep a fire going, and leaves nearby, so I can send smoke signals as a backup in case all these newfangled "electronic" devices fail.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I have worked utility construction, and yes that stuff does happen from time to time. It happens when old lines are maintained too. Any underground work poses those risks. There are standards and procedures for working underground which are generally adhered too. One of the biggest problems is poor marking of old lines (in the ground and on surveys).
This sounds to me like a complaint of a competitor desperately trying to stop progress.
"brxref
... to do their first deployment.
Slashdot's name? When my compiler sees
I think every time a FTTP article I must mention this, but this is one plus to living in Utah. the fiber based initiative is community owned and NOT owned by the Telcoms and just think, if there is enough of a geek swell to Utah, we could oust Orrin Hatch! :-) OK, that was delusional thinking, but, but, it might work, plus we'll have FTTH, not just FTTC!! :-) (which won't do much good because of the draconian community indecency policies, which effectively outlaws not only porn but anything >= R rated movies...On second thought, perhaps we can live with the telcoms, at least we can still get our porn from them ;-)
1 - Dig Hole
2 - Get covered in sewage
3 - Minivan full of children sinks in sewage
4 - ???
5 - Profit!
how long until
> [Can we] have Verizon install FTTP to Congress, the White House, ... ? :)
With the amount of raw sewage coming out of there already, anything new would hardly be noticeable...
Your brain is not a computer.
I work for a telco and we plough cable every day. We do this in populated neighborhoods and new lots. It is extremely rare that we cut a cable (in fact I do not know of one in over a year), but NEVER a pipe. This work is not really Verizon's fault as it seems they are hiring subcontractors to do the work. This is a simple case of incompetence where the subcontractors do not call for a LOCATE (or they get a locate done so far in advance that it washes away or something).
Also, I'm sure you all realize that this has nothing to do with fiber to the home, it has to do with people not being able to dig properly.. no matter what they are laying in the ground.
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
Florida has a version of this. Someone should send the link to these lowest-bid contractors.
http://www.callsunshine.com/corp/index.html
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
Okay, so some kids may be lost, but this is fiber to the home we're talking about here! Some sacrifices must be made.
Besides, it's not like they're taxpayers or anything. Plus, what're they gonna DO, CRY about it? Puh-lease. Stupid cry-babies.
You are right, backhoe outages and the like are nothing new.
:)
But can you find me an example in your Google searches of something as interesting as the fiber to the premises technology deployment causing these problems and THEN the problems being SO BAD that they were covered by major media outlets and then the deployment was BLOCKED by a government agency? What about one involving moving minivans being swallowed by sinkholes and video of cars in other such sinkholes?
When I woke up this morning and saw the headline "County to Verizon: Stop deploying Fiber" or whatever I knew it was a Slashdot story, apparently the editors agree with me
Hope this has cleared up your question sir.
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
So, anybody know if the county voted Republican or Democrat?
Hmmmm, geysers of raw sewage... Nope, still sounds like either party.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Don't they have maps to locate lines, sewers and such? Don't tell me they're digging blindly...
Most states have a requirement for a "call before you dig" service. This service will notify the local utility owners in your area to come out at mark their underground utilities in your area and if you follow the procedure it essentially eliminates the legal liability of breaking the utility if you dig and hit it when it wasn't marked.
The problem is that a LOT of utilities in the US do NOT have good "as-builts". See in construction things are often built differently, or located in a differnt location due to a conflict the designer did not have knowledge of. These field changes are supposed to be cataloged and used to create "as-built" drawings that show the location of the utility as it was actually placed.
Now Verzion hires contractors to place lines, the contractor if it's following procedure has the utilties located and begins digging. If the Contractor then rips a gas line in half because the gas company didn't flag it the Contractor usually can't be held responsible. The same goes for other utilties.
Providing Verzion and their contractors are following the accepted construction practices and complying with the law the problem is not of their making or anything they can fix. The problem is the utilitiy owners that don't know where their lines are and instead of the dealing with the real problem the county halted the operation which is treating the symptom and not the problem.
Or is it the poor record-keeping? When you dig, you're supposed to call and have the location of utilities marked. They get marked according to what's in the city of county records. But what you find under ground does not always match:
my neighbor had a gas pipe marked going along the edge of his lawn then doing a 90-degrees turn and going along the other edge. But the gas company saved few feet of pipe and laid it straight along the diagonal, under the lawn.
power line is marked right next to my foundation every time I call for markings. It's about 2 feet away from the foundation, actually.
my other neighbor discovered a buried cable conduit under his lawn, with active cable. Nobody knows what the heck it's doing there, no cable is marked anywhere near.
Save yourself the click; Miss Utility isn't hot, and there aren't even any bikini shots.
=(
Assuming you're not just being ironic (sorry, I don't speak Initialese), NO, they don't have to call the 800 number. They have maps. You know, those paper thingies with lines and symbols on them that let you figure out where the subway stops are and that kind of stuff? But the maps are wrong. This is because they are old, and apparently nobody bothered to update them as things were changed over the years. And, as someone else has pointed out, the water table in Florida is somewhere around your knees, so you have to bury everything at the same level. And it's not a good idea to install stuff above ground because of the weather--lots of cyclonic wind conditions and the like. So you either give the place back to the Seminole Indians, who had enough sense not to invent electricity, or you dig and hope you don't hit something.
Now the county keeps talking about using satellites and GPS, which gives you some insight into the state of THEIR neural network, so I have to conclude that the fault lies mainly with those same officials for not keeping the maps current.
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
If you're ever going out into the wilderness, bring a PVC pipe with you. If you get lost, you can bury it in the ground, and a Verizon crew will be along shortly to break it.
I think that you mean run the fiber above ground over the telephone poles. The problem is that fiber is sensitive to uv radiation. It darkens the fiber. So to run it above ground you need heavy and expensive cladding. So, naturally running it below ground is the preferred solution.
"It sounds like Verizon wants to get this test site up ASAP by focusing a lot of money and contractors on this one county."
Florida = Spam Capitol of the U.S. if not the world
Fiber = Uber bandwidth
You think?
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Thanks for playing.
This blame game wouldn't happen in Kansas. Kansas law requires an official "locate" before digging can commence. If the owners of said buried lines fail to locate their lines or mark them in the wrong spots, causing them to be dug up, they are responsible for the damage. Not the one doing the digging. I'm surprised Florida doesn't have a similar law.
It's pretty much the same way out here. If you don't mark your lines, it's your problem...
However, in the article, the county is also complaining that the contractors aren't telling what happened when they dig up a line. That's a big problem.
The city I live in is all 100% buried lines. All power, phone, cable, gas and water is buried. No telephone poles anywhere. The only exception is the high-tension towers coming down into the substations.
Early this past spring, the electric utility ran new lines down the street to the distribution transformer at the end of the street.
All the utilities came out and painted lines all over the place indicating where buried lines were. However, about 1/2 the residents on my street wound up with severed phone or cable lines. You could count them, because they were repaired first with temporary lines that you could see running along people's yards, then buried later.
My cable was cut, as was my neighbor to the right. My neighbor to the left had their phone line cut.
No water, sewer or lines were hit, but we likely have copper and iron lines (early 70's placements).
Buried utilities are always a bit of a mess. If Florida expected no incidents like this they are fools at best. Very few utilities have good accurate maps that are 100% free of mistakes. Most are riddled with mistakes and lines get hit. Really, you need to prevent where possible, but hits are going to be common.
-Matt
GPS is becoming more and more common in locating underground utilities. Basically, surveyor-quality GPS readings (using a surveyor GPS rig which not only uses satellite readings, but also local survey points) are taken of underground utilities every X number of feet. This, along with manual depth measurements, can create an accurate 3D utility map.
It's pretty interesting. Last major construction gig (major fiber plant/network rework) I was on we had a crew like this. They basically hung back waiting for the construction crews to either lay cable or conduit, and they'd take measurements before they buried it.
There is fiber on poles everywhere here. Almost every cable company has a decent ammount of fiber in the air going to the nodes, which are also in the air. Telephone companies use fiber on poles too. Sometimes it's just infeasable to get the right of way to lay fiber. Nearly every decent sized street around here has fiber on the poles. You can notice it by the little red or orange tags on the fiber at every pole, so nobody digs their gaffs into it.
And to reply to a reply to the parent post, fiber is more expensive to repair usually. Repairing fiber requires a special splice truck, with a fusion splicer in it, and trained (expensive) techs. There's probably only one fiber splice truck in a small town, probably less than 5 for a decent sized city. Repairing a high pair cable (assuming it's PIC) may take longer, but it can fixed by any outside plant tech.
The splicing costs for this project must be enormous.
Best possible moments for a sinkhole:
I read it but I must have overlooked that part. Yeah, that would be a big problem if they're doing that. Definitely irresponsible. Perhaps they have too many grunts and not enough foremen on the job sites. That might account for it. Maybe.
Sounds like a nice town. I'd love to see one like that sometime. Buried everything must be very aesthetically pleasing.
Really, you need to prevent where possible, but hits are going to be common.
Yeah, it's expected. Really you can't dig in any industrialized city and not expect to hit something. That's just the way it works. Like we netadms always say, there's nothing better for finding buried fiber than a backhoe. Network went down? Blame it on a backhoe interrupt. :-)