You're right. I forgot about the decomissioned pipelines. Although, you'd be surprised how stupid some of these morons with backhoes are! I remember a major MCI cut along their west coast route a few years ago that took out the entire northwest for 8 hours. The guy was 600 yards away from where his permit allowed him to dig. He stopped when he cut the fiber and shut his hoe down. When they got out there, they found that he was digging right next to train tracks, was inches from cutting a high voltage power line that surely would have killed him, and was also fairly close to a gas line.

It's not always the equipment operator. I was witness to a ConTel fiber cut along Route 66 aboard MCLB Barstow. The fiber was cut by, get this, a road grader. The fiber was buried (if you could call it that) along the shoulder of the road (which sloped upward about three feet), three feet from the edge of the road, _at road level_! It was also over 6 feet out of alignment with the orange markers. In the process of widening the road, the grader caught the conduit and broke it, along with the fiber. The operator didn't even know he did it until the ConTel crew showed up. Crude ASCII art of where the fiber was buried (in profile): ----------- / _______________/ X <------- Fiber ^ | Road This cut supposedly (according to the ConTel repair crew) killed phone service, including 911, for 120 square miles of eastern California. I heard that they went to a SONET ring shortly after this incident..... -- Eric Kozowski VP Internet Services eric@structured.net Structured Network Systems, Inc. (800)390-5945 Support A Verio Affiliate (800)881-0962 Sales/Info http://www.structured.net/ PGP Key fingerprint = 0A E4 91 B8 BD CB 3E 95 42 12 04 4E 14 DF 86 76 'They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.' -- Benjamin Franklin 1759