As a resident of this area, I can say that the place where this regen hut is located is *very* rural. Burlington Northern/Santa Fe railroad tracks pass through a lot of sparsely populated farm land on the route between Mt. Vernon and Bellingham, WA. Even if the hut is locked with a high quality padlock, it's likely nothing that 5 minutes with leverage-action bolt cutters can't handle. Police/Fire/Ambulance response time to the area of Edison and Samish Island can be 20 minutes or more on a *good* day. There are very few diverse fiber routes between Vancouver BC and Seattle WA. Roughly in the area of highway 237 and the Samish River: http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?pan=s&mapdata=xU4YXdELrnBtd4g5hI1PGRNlySQfch%2bqdjpBB4TBINz%2fUQm6R84fJ7yDtDwM2ljwyhOR2o%2fCt%2ffRtis8RfTOdZDUP9096JsDxLMZqtdGFvNjXABad2nK0xx9gJUamjzjrATJKl1HjOamI04FeytjXnw1MomthDV%2bROX8DtZK7ozw56qMxFwoFr2P6fAb0zySswuDgsBnntA1cy3KvxVJjhgtdxEswuDz9mRY1%2f%2bEJO9eJ4eHNuZlAWf%2b5jRJ1RCu%2b%2fndr5dyWMKcRVoZq41zTVMjgU0HcBqZCCxZmpvOjQL1ilZId0LltA%3d%3d smlnk version: http://www.smlnk.com/BtkA At 08:38 PM 11/2/2003 -0500, you wrote:

KIRO TV has a report concerning the fiber cuts targeting a particular fiber route in the Northwest US. It has been been disrupted four times in the last two years, not by backhoes, but by someone entering a fiber hut.

North Sound 911 Service Repeatedly Targeted by Chris Halsne KIRO 7 Eyewitness News Investigative Reporter [...] This person hasn't been randomly chopping entire bundles of cables, but rather he or she is using surgical precision to black out one particular 911 emergency call center.

Early in the morning of Sept. 3, some criminal strolled into a Qwest Telecommunications server station with tools in hand and carefully sliced one strand of wire. [...] Operators couldn't help but feel a sense of dj vu. KIRO Team 7 Investigators have learned that someone intentionally rerouted, cut or altered 911 service to Whatcom County on three occasions in two years. Each time the criminal entered the same Qwest fiber optics "hut" to create the chaos. [...]

http://www.kirotv.com/news/2601577/detail.html