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The Backhoe, The Internet's Natural Enemy
Juha-Matti Laurio writes "Experts say last week's Sprint outage is a reminder that with all the attention paid to computer viruses and the latest Windows security holes, the most vulnerable threads in America's critical infrastructures lie literally beneath our feet. A study issued last month by the Common Ground Alliance, or CGA -- an industry group comprised of utilities and construction companies -- calculated that there were more than 675,000 excavation accidents in 2004 in which underground cables or pipelines were damaged." I estimate that one third of those accidents occured within the 5 block radius surrounding my office.
In the 90s, the University I worked at had a whole building cut off by a backhoe. The rest of the network stayed up, because the core network was a redundant FDDI ring.
Nothing is for certain.... Take the big power outage of 2003, which lasted for several days, why would the Internet be any different?
I would love to see what all these "oops" cost. Fiber optic is not exactly cheap, and it is a little more complicated than just reconnecting the severed ends. And then take network down time etc.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
They're just trying to find a torrent of Dig Dug...
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
We must be in the same office building :-{
and I see it at least daily during construction season. just because you have two carriers doesn't mean their fibers don't run in the same duct, everybody cross-leases dark fiber to everybody else.
you need protection from backhoe fade, you have to do the interagency engineering for separate feeds on separate systems from separate directions. will at least triple your cost to bring it up.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
So someone cut through an internet-carrying line with a backhoe? Well, it's still a much higher chance of staying safe than aboveground lines. I think we just need a better system of marking stuff. Unfortunately, all error ends up being human, so things like this will continue to happen until our robotic overlords finally take over. Oh well.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
We're moving everything to digital so there won't be any wires anywhere in the world.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
the EARS' natural enemies...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I'm sure the contract to lay that fiber went to the lowest bidder. Good ol' capitalism at work.
Always carry a length of fiber-optic cable in your pocket. Should you be shipwrecked and find yourself stranded on a desert island, bury the cable in the sand. A few hours later, a guy driving a backhoe will be along to dig it up. Ask him to rescue you.
It is funny, but a company will spend tons of money to buy high-availability products, fail over connections, redundant machines, and it only takes one backhoe to bring it all down. At our company, we are trying to figure out how to use cable over telephone pole (business class cable) as a backup in case we get "dug up", which would provide a new level of reliability, but I am sure somewhere out there there is still some unavoidable single point of failure that no amount of money can overcome.
So the DHS wants to protect this infrastructure by making the location of such lines protected. Which of course is not going to help the situation because when you call Dig Safe they wont know whats under you. So you run the risk of severing more cables, and you run the risk of injury to the workers. I tip my hats to them.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
mod parent down, he's a retard
Well, we also have cables going thru the ocean and the same kind of problems happens as well, but it's obviously not backhoes that cause that. What are the top reasons cables go bye bye on the ocean?
That reminds me of when Qwest cut all telephone lines to my home town - including 911. It made the local news, and the police chief and fire chief were both pretty pissed about it. They had to increase police patrols since no one could just call in a crime, fire, or medical emergency.
Fortunately nothing serious happened while 911 was out.
Then Qwest did it again, two days later, on the same line...
Ah, telecom monopolies.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Information Technologist: 0
Red Neck: 1
We have had SBC Yahoo DSL at home for about 6 or 7 years now. A few years ago when comcast was "upgrading" our cable service for HDTV, their crew managed to cut through the telephone line buried in the ground outside our house, which killed our internet and phone service! I think they train them to do that. In the time it took SBC to come and repair it, we could have potentially switched over to cable?
:X
is this what they were thinking?
Argh i give up! Those conniving small minded cable companies
--
Keepin' it real over at http://wi-fizzle.com/!
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
I'm wondering if anyone else has had this experience. You're power or phone service is out when you get home. Suddenly you remember the group of city workers mulling about a section of excavated road not too far away...
There are no uninteresting things. There are only uninterested people.
Sorry, that one is played out!
-- Brought to you by Carl's JR
Evi Nemeth used to tell us how to lay out a fiber ring -- separate egress from the buildings, diverse routes from location to location, etc -- and how NOT to lay out a ring.
When CU Boulder put in their fiber ring, they ran the spans in separate conduit, which they lay in the same trench. The conduits were not at different depths, nor were they really that far apart (about 3 inches)
They put the bright orange plastic sheet ("Hey backhoe guy! Stop digging now!") right on top of the conduit, then filled in the trench.
Surprisingly, it got cut.
That's like saying that the gun kills, and not the person holding the gun. So much for another Slashdot article title.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
At least right now I can get one hundred percent digital quality television. Now you're telling me that the whole world will be completely digital quality too?
Will technical marvels never cease?
... Nothing to ping here, move along!
The Sharpie, Sony's natural enemy.
Heat, the XBox 360's natural enemy.
Holes! define who vee are, und vhere vee are going.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I remember an article way back comparing Japanese construction practices to American. In Japan, the construction supervisor's job was on the line if they screwed up and hit an underground line. Net result, a lot less construction outages in Japan.
To misquote Futurama:
"The Internet was impervious to our most powerful magnetic fields, yet in the end it succumbed to a harmless sharpened stick."
I seem to remember the whole point of the internet was to maintain communications in times of war by being a.. wait for it.. NETWORK!!.. otherwise we're at constant risk from JCB's of mass destruction.
-AlexC
Let's hear it for the infamous fiber-seeking backhoes!
I spent most of last month waiting for SBC to un-b0rk my DSL and phone service when the fiber loop I'm on was cut by the village (while they were installing new street lamps, 30 blocks away).
This is not a sig. this is a duck. quack.
blah blah beta blah blah blah beta blah blah
According to the article, in 2004, nearly half of the accidents were caused by on-site workers not checking with the proper support numbers for underground cables and/or pipelines.
I wonder just how much those incidents would be reduced if companies were fined a stiff penalty for digging without calling these numbers. The type of astronomical fines/penalties levied against virus writers would seem very appropriate in these cases, given the type of economic damage that can be caused by telecom outages.
I'm glad to see that a national calling center is being established (similar to 911, according to the article). Now, it will be easier for workers to call. But I still think we need the other half: better (financial) incentive to make those calls in the first place. -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
I quite literally just got phone and internet back in the office. I tested the connection by going to /. and this was the top story. Way too funny!
I worked for a company that built the network for a new building on the University campus. The main feed was a 1200 foot run of fiber. It was put in, terminated and tested and all was good. 2 Days later the line was ripped in half by a backhoe from the company they contracted to do the plumbing.
Rumors said the guy was fired due to failing a drug test.
Every time I see a backhoe go by I go into an Elmer Fudd voice and say, "Be wery wery qwiet... I'm hunting fiber"
For some reason the Servers and Networks guys don't think it is funny.
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
Those of use from the telecom world recoginze
this as "backhoe fade" and ARPA has conducted
considable research on the effect of fiber
optic cable to attrace backhoes in the wild...
ARPA Science Research Funding News Today......
ARPA to Fund Network Reliability Research
Washington, DC -
The Advanced Research Projects Agency of the DoD announced today they are
funding a three-year effort to improve the field reliability of
fiber-optic communications networks. The program is aimed at reducing
network outages from damage to buried fiber optic cables caused by
construction machinery. Many telecommunications outages are caused each
year when machines called "backhoes" dig-up underground fibers, cutting
them and causing massive service disruptions.
This phenomenon is commonly referred to as "backhoe fade" and
the uncanny ability of the construction backhoe to locate buried
cables will be the focus of this effort.
Dr. Zweiback Gimfizel of the Marginalia Institute of Technoplasty
has been designated Principle Investigator on the project and
held a news conference today and described the proposed line of
research.
"We are taking a page from the biologists who discovered
the magnetic organ in the brains of homing pigeon. This
organ senses the earth's magnetic field and allows the
pigeon to track its location.
"In like manner, our research will focus
on identifying the specialized organ structure within
the backhoe that can somehow sense the location of glass
fibers."
"The hope is that if this fiber-seeking mechanism can be
identified, measures can be developed to disguise
telecommunications cables, thereby creating "stealth"
fiber bundles which will not attract the attention of
the rampaging backhoes."
In another unrelated statement today, ARPA announced the creation of the
Remote Autonomous Rodent Program which will work on developing specialized
weapons systems for attacking the underground communications systems of
adversaries. In recent theater actions, modern fiber-optic communications
systems have proven quite resilient to traditional attacks and require
new techniques to disable them.
Dr. Gimback Zweifizel of Hardly Yardwell University was designated
Principle Investigator. In a prepared statement, Dr. Zweifizel noted that
this work program was funded for three years and was to produce a field
demonstration of a working system. Other details of the project are
classified.
What would Groucho do?
Wait until our backhoe overlords start thinking for themselves. Remember Killdozer?
In California we are required to notify USA DigAlert before all excavation. DigAlert then notifies all agencies with pipe in the area. Most of the time, they come out and mark, the other times, nobody does.
When nobody comes out an marks, and their line gets hit, it's on them. If it's marked and we hit it, it's on us. Accidents happen. Digging around mismarked and unmarked utilities in a big hole in the ground isn't easy.
Personally I'm more worried about my guys hitting a pressurized gas line than someones precious telco wire. Wire gets fixed in a matter of hours.
The Common Yellow Backhoe
The Common Yellow Backhoe attempting to hide from view.
The Hammer Backhoe evolved to fit particular niches.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The backhoe is the natural enemy of the internet.
We also know that the hole's only natural enemy is the pile.
Anything that's underground can be damaged by a backhoe... even big watermains...
Anyone remember the 4-story high geyser in Old Montreal last year?
You'd think that backhoe operators would triple-check what's underground in a metropolitan area...
So maybe we should all switch to wireless internet.
Would it be THAT easy for a terrorist or other agressive attack on our communications infrastructure?
I'm also left wondering why these big players like Spint doesn't have two wires for every important line like this? Cut one wire and the alternate route patches over with a notice. Cut the other and a notice is issued... both without incident to large scale service. If I can imagine it, then I know someone else out there has already thought of it.
I've actually created my own internet outages with my (now sold) backhoe, twice. Neither of them the obvious. I had a 802.11b feed from a neighbor's house, 1.1 miles away (my hill to his tower). Worked great, almost always. Finally figured out that if I parked my backhoe at --> that end of the back yard, it was enough into the fresnel zone of the wireless link that things got wodgy.
Next time I created backhoe fade, was again in an unexpected way. I'd been trenching along the driveway, after dutifully and carefully marking the underground phone line to the house (that the brain-trust from the phone company decided to run next to my driveway, despite instructions not to). I carefully and successfully avoided the cable, no worries there. Then, when reaching juuuuuuust a bit too far over, I got the backhoe stuck in the muddy ditch along the road. Apparently, in the effort to get un-stuck, I pressed down on the cable, which then stretched over a rock in the trench and broke.
The phone company (eventually) got out there and tried to say I dug it up. I showed 'em exactly what happened - yes, I'd been digging. Yes, the wire was marked. Yes, none of my digging was along the wire's path (all true). The cable had clear marks of a pull over a rock, not a cut from a hoe. Shear vs. tension, obvious from inspection.
Phone company guy didn't want any part of explainations until I (a) bet him that I could dig right (made an X) here and find a big rock with a sharp edge "that you people left in the trench of this improperly installed wire", and (b) pointed out that if he's gonna dig the trench, he's standing in poison ivy while doing so, and I could just go get the backhoe and make it easier for all involved.
He called his boss, explained the high points of the situation (including the poison ivy, which inexplicably a guy in his job didn't recognize without help), and they fixed the cable no charge. But, I bet I'm one of those statistcs in the article.
The hoe backs you!
Just bury the fibre about 10' down, and make sure to put a gas-line, or high-voltage cable about 7' down in the same trench.
This is defiantly true though. Living in a fairly recent subdivision, back when the construction was closer to my house this would happen all the time. The phone. The cable. The internet. Even the power once.
I think it's clear what we need to do: go kill all the backhoes.
Save the internet!
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
the company sought alternatives to "physically diverse protection paths" for its backbone network after confronting the "substantial capital investment" of running new cables
what I see is greed, upper managerial greed
if engineers were just allowed to build properly, none of this would be an issue
big business has been corrupted due to excessive affluence, therefore ineffective systems are the result
we been over-billed and under-delivered for years
personally, i suspect it will be getting worse
For those of you like me who didn't know what the fuck a backhoe is, here we go.
My coworkers thought I was choking when I read the headline. This needs to be on a t-shirt, STAT! Something I can get on the ThinkGeek store or something. A profile of a backhoe with "The Internet's Natural Enemy" under it. LOL!
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
The flaw is in the fact that all these people have to do the right thing. In this case, if some low-level Sprint employee reads the map wrong, a whole state can be without internet access. If some dipshit with a jackhammer doesn't call first, a whole block can be without access.
The better method is to devise a system with sufficient redundancy so that this is more rare than it is. The question is whether consumers are willing to pay for it in the form of somewhat higher rates.
A possible solution would be to embed RFID tags every 3 feet or so inside the conduit, allowing for easier location. Code embedded in tag would give owner, pipe or line type, and depth.
I worked at WilTel back in the early '90s. Back then, when a backhoe operator cut our fiber, we would manually patch failed DS3s onto spare capacity to get a few major customers back online-- this was before SONET rings. And you could always count a fiber cut to last about six hours... That was the amount of time to get people out there and splice it back together.
We had lawyers that just had the job of trying to recover damages from these small backhoe companies. Usually their cut was the result of negligence. If they followed procedure, and called for a locate, we could mark the fiber and even stand around on site if they were digging within a certain proximity. Anyway, so these lawyers would win a judgement, but the companies typically had no assests beyond their one or two backhoes, trucks, etc. So they would give up that equipment, turn around, and start another company doing the exact same business. There was no way to keep them from doing it again the following week.
The original Qwest contractors gave us a particularly bad summer if I remember right... They took their "revolutionary" rail car which could trench fiber along the railroad tracks, and cut us probably a dozen times down in the southeast states.
Since the backhoe operators are contractors to the bigger telecom/power/cable companies, there is really no way to recover and damages from them. Cute game.
If I was a terrorist & I knew that airlines & disaster-ready buildings were sealed up tight, what would I do ?
I'd quietly set sleepers up in housing & or commerce near major network lines.
I'd build tunnels to theese lines (can't be any harder than setting up an entertainment center in a cave or building a tunnel between Mexico & the US) but wouldn't touch them.
I'd release a video once a good percentage of my sleepers had their tunnels setup to notify the rest of them to get their asses in gear.
I'd release another video when it was time for everyone to cut the ribbins.
The other sleepers would know it's time to start blowing stuff up once communication was in chaos.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
he was digging for glass
Maybe the guys on the USS Jimmy Carter doesn't always get the connections right :)
backhoes were originally created to fight elephants?
99.999999% uptime is an unreasonable expectation for any service. Funny how the Internet is expected to be though.
Sounds like an addiction to me...
I think we need an intervention.
Bury the cables deeper... I'm thinking a couple of kilometers down. Let's see them hit those!
Off-topic: Name Not Used for Operator in "The Matrix": Backhoe
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
...That way, when he gets lost, he drops the fiber on the ground, waits ten minutes, then asks the operator of the backhoe cutting the fiber for directions.
I worked for a major online car advert website (at the time was in VA). This is during the MCI/Cable and wireless fiasco. No one was quite sure who owned what. It turns out that a back hoe killed a line in Austel (SP?) Georgia. After around 17 hours downtime (100% internet business) the line is back but the DL3800 on CW seems to be having issues. The 2am tech dropped something (grounding screw i think she mumbled) inside while checking it out and smoked it. When the MCI guy asked to speak to the senior technician, she stated, "I are the senior technician.." At 6am the next tech was on shift and cycled a cascade router (think that's what it was, not my area) and we were back in 2 minutes.
Our office used to be located in an older area where the power wires and phone lines were above ground. At an extremely busy intersection nearby, a car would hit the pole at least once a month and knock out our power and/or phones.
Our UPS would only last a few hours, which wasn't enough time to fix the pole in many cases. I can't tell you how many times I've had to restore a database or fix a crashed disk due to some drunk idiot...
KeithSupport bacteria. They're the only culture some people have.
That was very funny. Well done sir.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Usually it's a case of someone not accurately following the locate procedurs , or not understanding them.
In one of our cases, the contractor called the 'hotline' but didn't realize that the hotline for commercial type work ONLY covered locting services in the right of way/easment along the streets. A seperate private locate was required for the rest of the property.
Sprint's comment that "In this particular case we had events simultaneously happen that are beyond our control." seems to be a cop out since a locate WAS called in and Sprint replied that they had no facilities in the area! I guess they need to improve the system that matches up requests to actual location records!
Keep Passing the open Windows...
Anyone know if this was on digg.com already? : p
This guy's the limit!
Backhoes don't care. Why? I'll relate a similar wire cut story. I was called out to our local airport to fix a problem with one of the airlines ground to air radios. This lets ground crews communicate with the flight crew. It is separate from air traffic control. In one room was the radio. In another room several doors down was a monitor speaker that could hear the conversation. I determined there was nothing wrong with the monitor speaker and nothing wrong with the audio and most likely a broken wire. The room separating the radio and speaker was quite large. The wire was run through the ceiling. I had to lift up many a ceiling tile to trace the wire and find the break.
I found the break. The wire had been cut and tied off. There was barely enough wire to splice the two back together. Once repaired the monitor speaker worked again. I was told later by the airline employees, airport facility workers had redone the ceiling in that one room. To me it appeared the workers found the wire in the way of their job, didn't know or didn't care what it was hooked to and simply cut it and tied it off out of the way.
Backhoe operators probably have the same mentality. They want to get their work done. If they cut a cable, it doesn't affect them. They are just doing their job. To solve this problem I would recommend burying fiber next to gas lines. The fiber should be coated with a material that bursts into flame 30 seconds after it exposed to air or cut. Not only will the backhoe operator cut the cable he'll break the gas line as well. The 30 seconds delay is to build up enough gas for a nice explosion. Sure it'll be a mess, but that's one backhoe operator who won't cut any more fiber.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
My work group jokes about our cursed building. Three years ago a large mower shredded the phone "pillar" out in the field near our building (go figure...3-ft. green box surrounded by 5-ft. grass). Now they mark the pillars with bike flags. Then last year a crew building a parking lot tilled up a good 20 feet of the comm lines. That line was marked, but it turned out it was a couple of feet closer to the surface than expected! Darn erosion...
Just pass a law that all fiber must be run in trenches right next to high pressure natural gas lines. Natural selection AND intelligent design :-)
I, for one, welcome our fiber-seeking backhoe overlords.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
...that hoes on their backs actually were the backbone of the 'net.
Just string all phone lines above ground on wooden Poles. We could even put the electrical wires up there too.
No matter where you go, there you are.
...because you weren't doing your job. And if you weren't in IT, you should have been raising holy hell about the IT people not doing their jobs.
The primary purpose of a UPS is to provide power briefly if the mains supply is interrupted, so that you may effect (manually or automatically) a graceful shutdown of the attached hardware, and avoid things like corrupted databases and crashed disks that result from sudden power loss.
So why did you have to deal with the same hardware problems you'd have had if you'd just plugged your stuff into a cheap surge protecting power strip? Why wasn't your UPS shutting down the equipment when it was running low on juice? And if power-interrupting car accidents were such a frequent occurrence, why didn't you suggest your company get a bigger UPS and/or backup generator if they needed their servers to stay up no matter what?
First off - setting up "811" as a nationwide Utility Locating service isn't a bad idea. I just have to wonder who gets to pay for the routing system? Is it going to be one of those extra charges on my phone bill? Also, 8 is very close to 9 on the keypad - how many calls to 911 will occur because people fatfingered the 8? I'd rather make the number "711" - but could see it playing havoc w/some PBX's...
411 is already used, 311 is used in chicago for their city-wide crap, what about 511?
Also, the whole concept of security by obscurity with the DHS buying into the BS promoted by the telco's not wanting to report outages isn't going to do anything to prevent terrorists from locating the fibers... All they have to do is go bike riding on the trails, and READ the sign that says "Caution: Buried Fiber Optic Cable. Call Before Digging"... ummm, that's probably the best spot to bury your improvised device... or dig at night, or . And if THAT's too much work, just keep riding until you see one of the 4' high orange/white dildo-shaped containers coming out of the ground (more splice points)... That'll probably do it too... OR, keep riding until you see a big steel cover with SPRINT or AT&T or MCI emblazoned on it... pull it up... insert improvised device... close cover... you get the picture...
This isn't rocket science people and an attack would be relatively simple to execute I'd guess w/o seeing any maps that maybe 7 cuts would be enough to fuck it all up... OR, how about the fact that MAE West is in a closet of a parking garage... MAE East is in a dubious location as well.
My point? Well redundancy is nice, but have a non-ground-based internet contingency plan in place as well defining how to deal with things if this happens...Maybe satellite backup?
What a unique opportunity for any terrorists. Want to bring part of the US infrastructure to its knees? You don't need a dirty bomb... A few well placed dudes and some shovels can do the trick and create widespread havoc. Quick, someone call Homeland Security and tell them to start a watch list for suspicious individuals purchasing shovels or backhoes in large quantities.
Just carry a deck of playing cards with you everywhere. If you're ever lost, start playing solitare. Someone will be along in five minutes or so to tell you to move the black jack to the red queen.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
What does this have to do with telecom monopoly ?
There is quite a difference between a service provider and infrastructure maintainer. And unless you want every single infrastructure to come in multiple (useless) instances, this could just happen with or without monopoly.
So please don't put your liberalisme credo into this.
In yet another security by obscurity intent, the gov will try to hide all reports about blackouts so the pipe locations remain unknown, Terrorist: (dials "call before you dig" hotline) phone: -ring ring CBYD: -hello how can I help you T: -Hi, we are going to dig in such and such area, c: -We'll mark where the cables are for you T: -Thank you!
This is cool.
Digg.
You must be new here.
Pessimists.net - as if life wasn't depressing enough.
I had the opportunity to work with the crew that took out the internet service for Boston in late 2003 (I think it was).
They were electrical contractors for BigDig work, and were supposed to remove electrical control boxes that were marked "dead". There were 3 marked boxes, 2 were dead electrical boxes that were all set to be removed, the third was a AT&T broadband fiber control box that someone had marked to be removed. All of Boston was without internet for about 8 hours.
Needless to say, the guys responsible for it were pretty pissed off at whoever marked it. But then again, that's what insurance companies hired by these giant contractors are for. -AA
Said in that Australian accent we've come to know and love:
Today I'm going to show you one of the wonders of nature. If you look down in that hole there you can long fibrous tendrils. Those are fiber optic cables and they snake their way through the ground all over the world.
Crikey, it's nice to see them. Usually they stay underground so this is really special. Just look at the size of the hole they make as they burrow through the earth.
Oh look! I didn't expect this. The only known enemy to these folks is coming over to investigate. The backhoe. Look at those nasty pointed teeth. I wouldn't want to get caught by them I'll tell you.
I'll just walk away so I don't disturb him. This could get real exciting any moment.
*growl* *snort* dig dig dig dig
Look at that! This is a real treat. The backhoe is digging up the fiber optic! Look at the way those teeth just dig into the soil and expose those poor buggers. Oh wow, just look at it as it tears those fibers to ribbons.
I know it may seem cruel to stand by and do nothing but this is part of nature. Someone has to eat and someone has to be eaten.
But don't worry mate, those fiber optics grow back real quick. In fact, they grow so quickly there will never be a shortage of them no matter how many get eaten by the backhoe.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Just like the power outage caused people's deaths, someday in the future people are going to die because of an Internet outage....
I have two friends who make a living marking the ground in prep for a dig. There are a lot of "cuts" as they put it. Due to their error, bad prints, bad backhoe ops, or a combo of those. You'd be surprised, the percentages they talked about were pretty high....20 to 30% cut rates. And that's using cutting edge metal detectors and such.
Dobo
Obviously these Telco Companies just need to start charging providers for sending data over their network. Right now the providers are using the networks for free you know! Of course they can't afford to build in redundancy with this sort of theft going on!
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
Neal Stephenson has a hilarious comment on this in "Mother Earth Mother Board", in his description of a big project to lay fiber optic cable in the Pacific Rim.
Q: Why bother running two widely separated routes [for cable from Point A to Point B] over theMalay Peninsula?
A: Because Thailand, like everywhere else in the world, is full of idiots with backhoes.
Q: Isn't that a pain in the ass?
A: You have no idea.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
SONET/SDH rings are *usually* but not always built this way.... SONET/SDH is a Layer 1 standard... but is does not specify construction details... the idea here is ring architecture, be it token ring, RPR, SONET, FDDI or whatever. Ring architecture is the bare minimum cheapest tradeoff of redundancy and cost Partial mesh with MPLS switching or routing is much more resilient.
It can be very hard to make sure that your connections are unaffeced by a fibre cut. I know a case where a company got redundant connections from two carriers. The connections leaved to different directions from both office buildings and everything seem to be fine. However, on one day both connections went dark at the same time. It turned out that the other carrier had leased one leg of dark fibre from the other carrier. Thus both connections were in the same physical cable that was cut.
It is difficult to get definite answers about actual physical routes and thus it is about impossible to know now close two connections are each other.
Pero usted necesita saber leer el inglés, amigo. :P
I work for a contracting company, and here in NZ, cost is about $1,000 per joint. Problem is, you can only have so many joints in a cable (especially the big ones), and then you have to rip up many kilometres of cable and lay new stuff... $$$!
Hehe, nice username BushCheney08! :)
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
Usually you tell the marking service how deep you're going to be digging. For most jobs they'll mark everything since the stuff isn't buried too deep.
For a lot of the "middle of nowhere" fiber feeds they bury them at least 6' (2M) deep. An electrical contractor friend of mine was doing a job "just north of middle of nowhere." He'd had the major fiber carrier in the area come out and mark where the bundle was buried. And they assured him it was 6' down -- which worked since he was only digging down about 4'. He tore the cable apart with the backhoe at 3'. The original contractor that had laid the fiber cable hadn't buried it to spec. The marked path of the cable was right on though.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
I estimate that one third of those accidents occured within the 5 block radius surrounding my office.
Office - an interesting name for the parents' basement.
What this is called is "backhoe fade"
While the backhoe is the Internet's natural enemy it is also a a necessary part of the circle. It proves often that redundant routing works other than having the much nastier enemy of the Internet, the nuclear bomb, set it's sites on it.
I have heard the first real world test of redunant routing was cause of a backhoe outside of Atlanta. Not sure how true that is or not.
1. The ignorant fuckers that originally don't put the wires where the plans say they go.
2. The ignorant fuckers who dig where you tell them not to dig.
Been victims of both.
"The 7 companies still have to be notified, and 7 people have to be sent out. Completely inefficient."
1-888-AlQaida
Besides, it's not the gun that kills, but the bullet(s). Those M-16 and derivatives aren't that great for bashing folks over the head with.
Now give me an M-1 Garand. Run out of ammo and you still have a decent club.
http://www.swapmeetdave.com/Humor/Insurance/Backho eA.jpg
. gif
http://www.msha.gov/fatals/1999/fatalgif/ftl99m21
What's the matter, James? No glib remark? No pithy comeback?
I used to see them around - does anybody know where to find them now? Google does't turn up anything...
My neighbors and I have had our share of underground utility outages while a new sewer line was installed. Cable, telephone, electricity and water were all out at some point during that period. To fix the problem, the companies just lay a new line and bury it, leaving the old. If you dig and find a broken wire, there's no telling if it's needed unless somethings stops working in your house (or your neighbor's).
I think there should be a standard for burying utilities. At least have a marked pathway where everything goes. Or how about a fixed conduit from the street utilities to your house? Make it easy to get to and hard to damage. Phone and cable wires could be lumped together, and the electricity could be nearby but obviously guarded from people accidentally touching it.
Sure a conduit box could be expensive, but given the number of times these guys have had to come out to our neighborhood to fix damage, it might pay for itself. Something has to be better than the present situation.
http://www.patternpage.com/dhouse36.jpg
What's the matter, James? No glib remark? No pithy comeback?
The US Dept of Homeland Security issued a bulletin to law enforcement agencies advising them to be on the lookout for groups of susicious characters operating backhoes. Intelligence analysts say there is a high probability of a terrorist attack against our network infrastructure in the coming months, the preferred method being excavation of cables, according to unnamed sources. A man was arrested in Montana while attending classes to operate a backhoe and has been under investigation the same sources reveal.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
Over here in Blighty I've been digging with a little mini backhoe for foundations for a greenhouse and found pipe - rusty iron about two feet down which for an 8 inch main is actually shallow. Put a crack in it, but no leakage fortunately. So we called round and Transco (gas infrastructure) reckoned it was theirs and sent a man out.
A short period of digging later and he came out the hole at some speed looking very pale. The said "pipe" had fins on one end and was delivered 60 years ago by some Germans who failed to stop and advise my grandparents of the delivery.....
"I mean, if you're going to build a dike you need a backhoe, right?"
Yes, that's how most of them get started. Do you backfill to change 'em back?
...that Bill Gates is a backhoe manufacturer ? "Microsoft Windigger - where do you want to dig today"
--
I do not use any Microsoft products!
My understanding of the incident was a software upgade to a router that "self-propagated" to update other routes of the same type... or some server somewhere that updated them on a scheduled rollout or something.
And the event was later adapted into an episode of Stargate SG-1 ?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I believe you have lay them anew.
KFG
I know that every time I see a backhoe, I cringe. In fact we have one working on some lines out by our road right now and I bet the jacka.^@^$%^#@@#@!NOCARRIER
Content Management System: A pretentious way of saying "text editor."
Augers and borers and drills, oh my!
Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn't always beat actual thought. -Terry Pratchett
Insurance write-off. If the contractor cuts a fiber and get's a fat bill for the repair, all they do is write it off on their insurance, reason given, "accident". One fix for this is for the underwriters to lock down these loopholes, forcing the contractor to be more dilligent on where they excavate. Ten to fifty grand for a simple fiber fix is good enough incentive to pay attention where the hell you dig.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
...as I discovered several years ago when GTE (now Verizon) lost several hundred feet of fiber and copper to a large auger working at a nearby high school. At least with a backhoe they've already dug the hole for the phone company guys. With an auger winding cable up out of the ground, the phone company guys get to dig a big, long trench looking for the other end of the line.
I had a situation at work where an excavation crew laid a fat single-mode line across the "campus," and two weeks later came in to lay a new sewer line to a building. Neither set of drawings had markings indicating the other job being done in the area (it's usually done because the PW dept. keeps the drawings updated). What a PITA. Hell, the trench for the fiber was still pretty fresh and obvious.
In my home neighborhood, we have two cable companies, and both upgraded within a month of each other to a fiber infrastructure. Same company, different contracts, same side of the road (but not my side!). I had neighbors across the street who lost their phone service twice to their water boring machine.
The best was when I went to a Network Appliance product demo. They were talking about how fast one could recover and come back online, when power went out. They DID have utility work going on up the street, so this was not faked. Sweet system, BTW, but too pricy for my old, cheap, employer.
Here in Georgia, USA, at least, you can make one phone call and have all underground gas, cable, phone, sewer, and electric lines located for you. For free. People come from the various services and stick little flags in the ground over the lines.
A couple years ago the water line from the street [into our basement] decided to start leaking on the street side of the water meter. (The house is 80+ years old.) We had the water line insurance, so the water company arranged for a utility representative to come on-site and mark everything. The sidewalk and street were marked in what appeared to be great detail re: the locations of all feeds.
The backhoe guy still managed to hit - and crack - the natural gas line.
The upside of all this is that the H2O company insurance paid for the water line, the contractor had to eat the cost of installing a new gas line and meter ($$$$!), and we got two new feeds for about 30$ (or six months of insurance premiums). PSA - get that insurance!
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Our UPS was some foriegn piece of crap built in the mid 90s that didn't have a way to notify our systems that the power was off. I raised all sorts of hell...
After I complained and begged for money for 2 years (and we picked up a billing system that crashed once), they finally forked up the money for a really large UPS (to hold 30+ servers for 3+ hours) - we didn't have physcal room for a generator. My production stuff was configured to shut down automatically, but due to them being cheap on the software end, I didn't have enough software licenses to put on non-critical systems.
I ended up writing a script on one of my production machines that watched for power outages reported from the software, then issued a "shutdown now" to the other boxes.
KeithSupport bacteria. They're the only culture some people have.
Even worse than backhoes are augers. A large website (traffic ~most of an OC-3) I work with just had an auger hit its last-mile feed. Not only does it break the fiber, but it pulled it out of the CPE termination all the way through the conduit back to the auger...
If anything, you'd think backhoes would be the internet's biggest friend. They're the ones who bring in the money.
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
>The better method is to devise a system with sufficient redundancy so that this is more rare than it is. The question is whether consumers are willing to pay for it in the form of somewhat higher rates.
Sometimes they do. A few years back Microsoft had a multi-fiber trunk cut by a construction worker. Microsoft had negotiated SLAs with its telecom provider(s) that included steep penalty clauses per minute of downtime. Cause and effect worked: the telecom contractors did the math and installed spare fiber and failover equipment, and the phones continued to ring at MS customer support.
Spare a thought for the backhoe operators, though: they could do everything right and still get into the situation of the one in my neighborhood who hit a high voltage power line. He had to sit very still for quite a while.
Those lines are put in by contracters and destroyed by contracters, they never read plans.
Why don't we do something sensible for a change? Why not install well known, well marked utility channels in the ground and, while we're at it, install bike paths along these corridors. Then we'd know where stuff is, it would be easily accessible and we will still be able to get around after the oil runs dry. And for those of us who would like to stop mushrooming into diabetic blobs, we'd have options.
Have you ever looked at those huge square holes in the ground for high rise buildings and wondered why the walls didn't collapse?
The sides of the excavation are in effect nailed to the surrounding soil with long spikes of concrete. Someone takes an auger to the side of the wall and drills a long horizontal hole. Then another person comes around and pumps concrete into the hole. It works reasonably well in any soil that's coherent enough that you'd build a foundation in it.
Comes the day when the concrete pumping person notices a little more concrete than usual going into the hole. Then a lot more. Then a whole lot more. But if the hole isn't full with concrete coming back out the near end, guess what the foreman's going to say? So more concrete goes in.
The horizontal hole had intercepted a main sewer trunk. The construction crew was trying to fill the city sewer system with concrete.
And you though that maintaining software had dangerous side effects. I can't begin to imagine what that incident cost.
I installed a fence across the "true" (city surveyor marked) back end of my property line. I called phone/cable/power companies, and had them mark where my lines were.
They were all off by two feet, in the same direction.
We were told they were 6' down, we snapped cable at 1 1/2', good-bye phone at 2'. After that first snag, we dug VERY carefully with hand tools, only to find power not a foot away and a foot further down. Either the ground is shifting in Tennessee, or we've had some REALLY stoned public workers/contract workers.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Recently I was helping a relative move to his newly constructed townhome. I found a couple neighborhood kids collecting the marker flags around the properties.
Too bad they weren't the 'warning: pesticide' flags.. That would eventually solve itself, in a demented sort of way.
'A Negotium of scientia reperio tantum dissimilis of quam ignarus nos vere es.'
For a while I worked at an "underground assets management" company. The work was maintaining pipelines for companies (mainly oil) so they didn't have to have their own people do it (we mainly did cathodic protection, corrosion detection, and marking where pipes were when someone contacted Miss Digg [the Michigan call before you dig service]). I was amazed by how many times a company would tell us where a pipe was, and it wasn't there - we had to use a pipe detector and locate it, then would report the real location to the owner of the pipe (it was pretty funny seeing maps with corrections here and there, because they would only fix the area we reported, so there would be areas where it looked like the pipe suddenly teleported its contents 10 feet over then teleported back 20 feet later). At least two different companies has us map out with GPS and mapping software where their pipelines were, and sometimes their maps were WAY off. When companies don't even know where their own sh*t is buried I don't know how they expect to avoid problems like this.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
Is the damn squirrels. Why the heck do they feel the need to eat my fiber? Is fiber optic cable peanut flavored? I wish they would make the shielding for the cables out of cyanide. Little monsters.
I am not left-handed, either!
Short story back in 2000 I was working for a place in Cleveland, when a water main broke right outside our office. Whil trying to repair the damage, the workers dragged a very large piece of concrete over the *VISIBLE* fiber.... Pictures of the fun. http://mainbreak.nacs.net/images2.html
Things like this happen. It's regrettable, and can be avoided. But not with the current system. I've been in the business of placing underground cable for almost ten years and have seen many such cuts. The main reason? Laziness. Yep good ole plain laziness. We ALWAYS see a cable that we are going to cross by HAND before by power tool. As long as we know it is there. Many of the cuts that our company experience are caused by lack of locate marks. You simply can't avoid what you don't know about. And sometimes it comes from trusting the marks to much. Minnesota law gives us two feet from the mark. In other words, if we dig AT LEAST two feet from any mark on the ground we are not liable for the cut. The problem with this is that locating devices are notorious for being out of adjustment or simply being used in an incorrect fashion. There are companies that get paid to locate for the big telcos and cable companies. They often schedule themselves so tightly that they rush the job and locate very sloppily. I've personally seen marks up to twenty feet off. And you have to understand it from our perspective. Time is money. If it takes longer to find the cable than to simply cut and fix it, then it comes down to which will cost the least. If the marks are more than that two feet off, it doesn't cost us a dime. We try to never do this, but there have been times when we felt it needed to drive a point home to the locators that we need acurrate marks. AS stated earlier.we try to never do this. I have personally looked for one cable for a full day before giving up. Most of the time it comes down to cooperation between the construction company and the locators. We have in the last few years started to locate many things ourselves in an attempt to speed up and make the process less painful. So don't automatically blame the contractor. It may just not be their fault.
he was called to a dig where an outside company were digging a trench across the grounds of the hospital. although they had permission to dig, the men had poor maps and despite being told they should exercise extreme care, took out the three-phase mains feed! Of course, the hospital had UPSs for operating theatres etc, and diesel generators, but it still tripped breakers in various places causing a mad rush to get things back up.
meanwhile, the trench diggers, thinking they'd gotten past the danger spot, carried on, and took out the water main within the hour!
my friend was home very late that night
it's not the backhoe, it's the morons operating them that are the problem!
This is why I was hird at Otto Electric some time ago, I could withstand the poison ivy/oak/sumac (since it didn't seem to affect me) and dig the proper hole where it needed to be.
Guess being a grunt helps sometimes!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Quite a few years ago when I was at university, they were completely renovating some building. The construction workers saw a 6in pvc pipe and figured it was the line down to the sewer. They went on their merry way and hooked up all the toilets in the building.
Now it turns out that this pipe actually used to carry the phone and data cables over to the main datacenter, and a few days later raw sewage starts appearing behind their patch panels.
At least IT had a laugh about it, posted a message on their website apologizing for the sh*tty network performance.
Here, in Romania, if you want to burry some FO 3 feet below the ground you have to signal it. How ? You add yellow band all along the fiber 1 ft below the ground and a red one 2 ft below the ground. When some construction crew starts digging they will see the stripes and stop or call somebody ...
I think we just need a better system of marking stuff. Unfortunately, all error ends up being human, so things like this will continue to happen until our robotic overlords finally take over. Oh well.
You forget that nature does take a place in the moving/bending/altering the route of pipes, wires, etc. The ground moves whether or not you perceive it, either by means of weather or via our tectonic movements. Some land may move faster than other land, with the help of weather. Inches over millenia is merely a baby step in time for a continent, or part of a continent.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Back in time, in a land far away... at least from here.
The Gas plant I worked at had a slight contratemps with a local farmer, through whose fields the (36") gas pipeline was run. The farmer decided to use a plough on a path under which he knew there were cables. Took us days to get phones back... This was the early internet, that which operated at 300 baud, took days more to catch up with all the missed data. Good job p0rn in those days was literary.
So for backup we should all get some wlan mash networks going. In the near future we might just get WiMax, or even better: WiMax mash networks.
3M manufactures a line of electronic marking tags for underground utilities, and a "geiger counter" type device for finding them:
http://tinyurl.com/6zw7u
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
I wonder how many of those accidents were caused by some yokel and a gas-powered trencher from The Home Depot?
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Wouldn't the workers have noticed that the pipe was full of wires when they cut into it to make the tie-in?
Why would you have wires running in PVC plumbing pipe, when there are electrical conduits made for this purpose (which are clearly marked as electrical conduit)?
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
When I was in Afghanistan with the US Air Force, we worked in a Marine air traffic control compound that was still pretty rough around the edges. Most importantly, all the data and vox lines ran on the ground because we didn't have the equipment or materiel to trench them. The Marines had these generators that they refueled with 7.5 ton trucks. One morning, I was having a smoke with a jarhead telephone troop and we saw the main cable bundle (approx 3 inches around) move about 4 inches sideways. We looked at each other and I said, "I think we're gonna have some outages." Sure enough, we started getting runners about 5 minutes later. No phone calls, you see, because the truck had locked a wheel on the rear axle and dug a 1 to 6 inch deep trench for 150 yards through the compound. Bastards didn't even notice. They cut 30 some odd telephone lines, 10 data, and a couple of tactical fiber links. They also decided to do this about 1100, in August, in Afghanistan. That was a fun day.
Now that we got the backhoe, I'm gonna stick my thumb up 'is butt!
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Recognising one of those - ESPECIALLY if it's digging up cables - would be very important. Can you imagine how many cables it could go through in an hour?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The best story I know of here is when construction workers in Adelaide Uni accidently took out a water pipe that was not marked on the plans. The water pipe leaked water which then flooded an underground datacenter. This took out the majority of the uni's IT services and thanks to the close associations of the State's uni's, most of the services of the state's other universities as well.
So not a direct kill by the back hoe, but a damn good one none the less.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
We had a day long outage in the area where I live from a backhoe last summer. It actually broke an overhead group of fiber lines. Internet was out in the area for several hours. A couple years before that, a fire in a vault casused by a backhoe operator on break who threw a lit cigarette down caused a day long outage for several thousand people. Don't assume that all accidents caused by backhoes are the result of cutting lines while digging. Wendall
Since you haven't had a straight answer yet, I'll troll for karma^W^W^Wanswer your question.
The two biggest reasons for undersea cuts are boat anchors and bottom-drag fishing trawlers. The fishermen are the worst, there are areas where large numbers of undersea cables come in to shore, and fishing is outlawed. That means the area has a large amount of bottom fish (mollusks and the like) due to underfishing, which attracts idiot fishermen. They'll get their nets caught on a fibre, winch it up back and cut the fibre to save their nets. The ones who survive the first time they cut a fibre (which has high voltage to power undersea repeaters, 2000VDC at 10Amps from shore), learn to cut with non-conductive saws away from their boat. There are also lots of ships which drop anchors and catch a fibre, or crush it or drag it over rocks. Fortunately, most cuts happen within view of shore, so repair costs are only astronomical. Cuts further out tend to require a whole ship's compliment for a few weeks, and pro divers aren't cheap.
There is also a problem that undersea cables eventually come to land, usually very far away from civilisation. Then the fibre continues overland to get to someplace useful, and all the normal rules for backhoe fade come into play.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Carry a bottle of gin and a bottle of vermouth with you. When you get lost, pour one shot of gin into a glass, and two shots of vermouth. You'll get people coming from every direction telling you "that's no way to mix a martini!"
John
I remember once, when I was in college at the University of Nevada, Reno, in about 1992, the entire STATE of Nevada was cut off from the Internet for a couple of days. A backhoe in San Diego broke the ONE cable that carried all the traffic for the state.
I'd presume they have a bit more redundancy now.
Ive been to a lan party with stretches of cat 5 running all over the place and two 6 week old kittens in the same room.
The network outages were pretty severe when the kittens noticed all the pretty coloured wires to hunt.
My father is a former big whig for a nearby city, and he tells me that often times the maintanance crews would find fiber lines where they shouldnt be, often illegally located in and along and through santitary and storm water lines. He told the crews to treat them as big tree roots if they were not on the plans... Telecom companies would get soooo pissed, but couldnt do anything, since the conduits they laid in those cases were illegal to begin with and were causing infrastructure issues for the city.
On the flipside, how many MORE utility interruptions on above-ground lines were caused by downed trees, ice storms, car accidents, etc.?
We lost a SS7 branch (no backup this far out on the SS7 system, mind you) down here in south Texas in the Mcallen due to backhoers. Corpus Christi, Robstown, Port Aransas, Aransas Pass, and Rockport lost the ability to run credit cards, make cellular calls, 1/2 of those communities lost long distance functionality, not to mention internet access using that fiber.
The site was well marked with trunk warning flags and markers.
The boss said dig on top of the trunk.
The foreman said dig there.
The workers dug.
8 hours.. Thank god there was a MCI fiber truck nearby when they screwed the pooch.
They got their 5 minutes of fame on the evening news and a fat bill from MCI.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
I'm responsible for the utility locates where I work, and I can tell you it's a pain in the butt. The main driver behind it all was fiber optics and lawyers all along, imho. The only thing that ought to be undergound imo is water/sewer and gas, if it uses wires, it need to be hung from poles like GOD intened it to be. ;) lol
That said, the biggest problem is locating the darned things in the first place so a contractor knows where they are. No, actually, and I speak from experience, the biggest problem we've seen is lazy contractors for the phone company who will bury the phone lines DIRECTLY ON TOP OF ANOTHER UTILITY BECAUSE THE GROUND IS SOFTER because it's already been disturbed. Nothing like calling in 72 hour locates to find that the fiber optics run right on top of the water mains... or worse, that they missed locating the darned things by 10 feet, or they aren't located at all. I have a standing request with our crews that if they ever come up on a fiber optic cable that is mislocated, to please notify me so I can come out with a chainsaw and a meat grinder and take 100 feet of the line and make mincemeat (mincefiber?) out of it and send it to the phone company in a baggie.
No, I won't do that, but after all the lawsuits we've been through when the phone company is at fault, it's tempting.
There needs to be a national standard for laying fiber optic cables whereas they are not allowed within 20 feet running parallel to any other utility, and if they cross, they are to be encased in concrete of kevlar or steel conduit. Anybody stupid enough to put something that delicate underground ought to have their heads examined in the first place, if you ask me. ...and then they complain when it gets hit. Underground excavation is not as easy as you may think, and things are going to get hit, no matter how careful you are. Ground penetrating radar for locating is a joke in rocky soil, pipe horns pick up just about anything, and will give false readings and place you precisely in the center of two lines sometimes no matter how good you are. I used to bury phone drops for Bell South, and when we'd show up for a dig, the first thing I'd do as crew leader is tell the crew to verify locates with a pipe horn, and then I'd dowse afterwards.Accuracy for pipe horns: abismal. Accuracy for dowsing: 100 percent. Kreskin can kiss my bootay, dowsing in the hands of a capable person is far more accurate than pipe horns. How's it work? Who knows, and who cares? All I know is it will find water lines, sewer lines, phone lines, even gas lines that are improperly buried (no wire running with them for pipe horns to pick up). I've not once had a doubter that I showed how to do it come away not totally amazed that it actually works.
But the main thing is, you have to be careful, and pot hole frequently. Have a man watch when you use a backhoe, and if the ground around the bucket pulls, have him stop immediately, and pull out and go in to verify as to whether you are pulling a root, gas main, or mislocated fiber optic. If it's a root, no problem, if it's a gas line, well, you probably just pulled it loose somewhere down the line, and you need fire, and gas company reps immediately. If it's mislocated fiber optic, shut down, move, call me, and let me have some fun with my chainsaw and meat grinder, please!
Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride
as "Blackhoe" ? ;-)