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All of DeLeon and some nearby areas got a
reminder last Thursday, May 3, of how much our lives depend upon
electronic communications, and how our lives are affected and
inconvenienced when those links to the greater world are suddenly
severed.
Early that morning, area residents found
that they could not make nor receive long distance phone calls from
their traditional wired telephones, although they could make local
area calls. Cell phone service was generally unavailable as well,
although there were exceptions. Those seeking communications through
the internet encountered the same problem, both in sending and
receiving, again, other than locally. 9-1-1 emergency service was also
generally unavailable.
Not only DeLeon, but areas around Gorman,
Eastland, Ranger, Cisco and Strawn were directly affected. Ripple
effects of the communications outage were also experienced in a broad
area southwest of the primary impact area, reaching as far as San
Angelo.
Days later, details of the event that
triggered the communications breakdown were still unknown, according
to Toney Prather, president of Comanche County Telephone Company and
Mid-Tex Cellular.
All that he knew for sure is that a break
occurred in a fiber optics cable owned by AT&T somewhere west of Santo
around 2:30 a.m. Thursday. The break occurred only hours after a
strong line of wind and rain storms had swept through the area late
Wednesday afternoon.
Although Prather was unable to find out
the exact location and details of the break, the non-business hours
timing and the recent weather situation led him to speculate that a
buried cable crossing a stream bed became exposed to flood waters,
perhaps caught some flood debris, and was ripped apart. Other typical
cable break causes, such as construction and maintenance activity, was
not likely to have been taking place at that time of day.
Prather explained that most lines of
communication in this rural area flow toward Fort Worth, gathering at
certain junction points. All of the area code 254 phone lines in
Comanche and Eastland counties are gathered onto a fiber optics cable
that runs into a communications junction, also owned by AT&T, in
Santo.
The Santo cable feeds into another
junction at Weatherford, and then on to Fort Worth and ultimately the
world at large.
All of the lines of communication from
DeLeon follow a single path until they reach the Weatherford junction,
at which point alternative lines of communication are available. Erath
county communications also feed into the Santo Junction, but over a
separate cable that was not affected. Communications lines in
Comanche, and other areas in the 325 area code, feed toward San
Angelo.
The effects of the cable break were not
immediate and complete for cell phones. Nearby cell towers, not
directly affected by the line break, were initially available, however
they soon became swamped by the heavy demand overflowing from the
directly affected areas.
Normal communications were not restored
until around 1:15 p.m., almost 11 hours following the initial
disruption. Many were asleep during the early morning portion of that
time, however, and the practical time of their disruption was not much
more than the morning and early afternoon.
The normal procedure in such a cable
break is for AT&T to dispatch a technician from Fort Worth to the
Santo area to determine the exact nature and location of the problem.
A repair crew is then sent from Fort Worth to the break site. Travel
time between Santo and Fort Worth likely accounted for a good portion
of the length of the communications outage.
The cable repair process involves
fusion-splicing, basically gluing together, approximately 100
hair-thin glass fibers while using a microscope to line up each
corresponding pair. The same process is repeated on either end of the
broken cable. Individual glass fibers are color-coded to allow proper
matching.
Prather explained that all of DeLeon's
telephone-based communications, whether ordinary phone lines, cell
phones, internet, and even 9-1-1 service flows over just four tiny
glass fibers.
Fiber optics cables have a much greater
data carrying capability than the earlier copper cables, and cost much
less. 9-1-1 calls are processed and routed through a computer system
based in Fort Worth.
Prather said that this was the first such
widespread, long-lasting outage in 12 years, and that the previous
instance lasted for more than a day.
Prather added that it is a testament to
the reliability of modern communications that breaks in service are so
infrequent and widely noticed, adding that the continuity of
communications service is much greater than for electrical power. |
