Ship Anchor Damages African Undersea Cables

New submitter Bastian227 writes "A ship anchoring in a restricted area disrupted an East African high-speed Internet connection. The damaged fiber optic cable is one of three new undersea cables in the area off Kenyan coast. Repairs could take up to 14 days. 'The Teams cable had been rerouting data from three other cables severed 10 days ago in the Red Sea between Djibouti and the Middle East. Together, the four fiber-optic cables channel thousands of gigabytes of information per second and form the backbone of East Africa's telecom infrastructure. Telecom companies were reeling over the weekend as engineers attempted to reroute data south along the East African coast and around the Cape of Good Hope.'"

Comments

Three others in the area severed 10 days ago?

[exploder]

Another bunch of accidental cable disruptions clustered in space and time? Am I paranoid to wonder if something's going on here? Or is it like how earthquakes get more press when they come in bunches?

Re:Three others in the area severed 10 days ago?

[Anonymous Coward]

Takes me back to Iran 2008 when all of the fiber cables going in to Iran got 'accidentally' severed at once. Huge denials about there being anything more than an unfortunate coincidence, yet not long afterwards when Iran held their elections there was a wave of twitter led demos contesting the result (the result was subsequently found to be correct by that Carter mob) All sorts of co ordinated net led attacks on Iranian government. Afterwards it becomes public that Congress had thrown a coupla hundred mill towards using IT esp social networking to disrupt Iran.
This time they had the coup first and are destroying the system afterwards. Way back in the early noughties before Africom, a certain Libyan leader took it upon himself to provide most of Africa north of the Equator with a cellular network. Now that the Libyan has been sodomised (literally as well as figuratively check out the uncut snuff vid) and the major telecommunications providers have finally realised that Africa is their last big untapped market, certain steps have to be taken to knock LAP Green, the Libyan company (100% owned by the people of Libya - what are they commies?) out of contention.

Restricted Area? What about liability?

[NoKaOi]

What exactly does "restricted area" mean in this case? If this means ships are prohibited from dropping anchor there and the ship did anyway, what is the consequence to the captain and ship owner? Loss of license for the captain for violating restricted area? Jail time for vandalism? Ship's owner on the hook for the cost of repair? Seems like if this sort of thing is becoming common than some severe punishment might encourage others to be more careful in the future...especially if it means loss of career and/or freedom for the captain and significant loss of money to the owner.

They have really good aim...

[EmagGeek]

You know that game where you drop a quarter into a fish tank and try to get it to fall into a shot glass to win a prize?

Somehow they keep dropping anchors through 5000 feet of water to hit a cable a few inches in diameter laying on the ocean floor.

Story Time!

[IonOtter]

When I was in the Navy, on Oahu, a friend of mine was a research assistant and professor at University of Hawai'i on Oahu. They were doing research on the Hawaiian Monk Seal, and had to attach fake rocks with electronic gear to the reef.

They were working in 300 feet of water, which is extremely deep for SCUBA, and highly dangerous even with mixed gasses. Bottom time is around 15 minutes, and deco times are in hours. Because of this, they needed to be near a decompression chamber in case of an emergency, but the closest one at the time was on Maui.

However, the Navy Seals out of Pearl have a portable deco chamber, so UH approached the Navy about teaming the Seals with the UH dive team. It was a match made in technical heaven: the Seals got dive time, which is always at a premium, and the UH team got expert dive buddies and a portable deco chamber on their ship, the Moana Wave.

They were out like this for over a week, and everyone got pretty friendly. Things were working perfectly, no issues, on schedule, everyone happy. On one of the dives, they got to the bottom just outside of the entrance to Pearl Harbor, and were making their way to the work site. There in the sandy bottom, was a set of tracks.

Just like you would see laid down by a bulldozer or tank.

They were about 5' apart and around 6" wide, and went from deep to shallow, following the slope. They didn't have time to ponder it for long, since they only had less than 15 minutes to do the work. They kept going and came across another set of tracks, this set even wider, and the tracks likewise even wider. Again, no time to gawk, so they went on.

After a long deco stop near the surface, everyone was dead tired. Each diver needs the help of two people just to take off the tanks (they were wearing 6 tanks), so everyone is sitting on the benches, just chatting. One of the UH divers mentions the tank tracks on the bottom, and how neat they were.

One of the Seals chimes in, "Yeah, that's a new one! I didn't think we had one tha-" And suddenly remembers where he is, and who he's talking with, and clams up.

That was 1998. Technology has only advanced since then.

Hanlon's Razor is only sharp until the next bit of data comes along.