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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?
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.
... 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?
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.
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
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
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.
run the fiber through the water line itself.
While it's possible, it is a huge hassle. Fiber (and splitters, etc) rated for underwater use is much more expensive. And will you guarantee that nothing bad will leach out of the fiber into the drinking water for the house?
It would be far faster, it would be far cheaper than digging trenches,
I doubt it, but it's possible.
it would be far easier to pop a fitting inside the house to extract the fiber from the incoming pipe than digging an entire trench!
So, what about all the valves? Going to run your fiber through that? Or create a new leakage opportunity every time you take the fiber in & out of the pipe ? And the bend radius of water pipes can be very short, much less than fiber.
They have knowledge but they don't have wisdom.
Sounds like the pot calling the kettle black.
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
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.
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.
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: