Posted by SJSdude on 1/3/2008, 7:11 pm
71.139.192.118
Copper thieves blamed for cable outage during Sugar Bowl game
By Laurie Au
lau@starbulletin.com
Oceanic Time Warner Cable said an outage that knocked out cable to tens of thousands of Hawaii customers during the Sugar Bowl on Tuesday occurred after suspected copper thieves severed a fiber-optic cable.
Officials filed a police report after technicians found a fiber-optic cable in Kalihi Valley bent at a 90-degree angle with several wires cleanly cut, Alan Pollock, vice president of marketing, said yesterday.
Screens went black at 5:15 p.m., during the second quarter of the much-anticipated game, which pitted the University of Hawaii Warriors against the Georgia Bulldogs. Service was restored by 5:50 p.m. for most customers.
"There was nothing we could have done," Pollock said at a news conference yesterday. "We're a victim of this. We're very sorry to our customers, particularly because of the game."
Pollock said the company is determining whether there will be any refunds for affected customers, but added this was a situation beyond its control.
A tree fell sometime before Tuesday, knocking the cable line to the ground in Kalihi Valley and making it easily accessible, Pollock said. Technicians believe thieves searching for copper in the wires bent and cut the cable, Pollock said.
"Unfortunately this was an act of malicious intent," said Pollock, who added there is no copper in Oceanic wires.
That cable provides service to 170,000 residents, but a majority of the Oahu customers did not notice an outage because of an automatic backup system. About 5,000 Oahu residents, particularly those in parts of Hawaii Kai, Punaluu and Kaneohe, were affected after the backup system failed.
Television screens for about 80,000 neighbor islands subscribers were fuzzy or black during the outage, which lasted about five to 20 minutes because it required manual backups.
The last time an Oceanic cable was vandalized was three years ago, also in Kalihi Valley, when someone climbed a pole to cut the cable line, Pollock said.
Pollock said the company received hundreds of phone calls from angry customers during Tuesday's outage. All broadcast and several cable channels were out, but most asked only about their connection to Fox, which had rights to televise the game.
Several residents affected said they would have been angrier if the game had been close or if UH was winning.
"It kind of put us out our misery a bit," said Lauren Conching, 25, of Kalama Valley. Conching, along with about 10 of her friends and family, watched the game on the Internet and a small battery-operated TV while waiting for the cable to return.
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