BANGOR, Maine — It took a little more than 13 hours, but all of the customers who lost their telephone and Internet service Tuesday morning when a construction crew severed major FairPoint Communications fiber-optic cables are back online, a company spokesman said Wednesday.
“Everything is back to normal operations,” FairPoint spokesman Jeff Nevins said.
Eastern Maine Medical Center was left with a single incoming hardwired phone line and e-mail capability after the cables were severed around 9:30 a.m. Tuesday near FairPoint’s downtown headquarters. The hospital was made the top priority and had its service returned seven hours later, at around 4:30 p.m., Nevins said.
With that cable fixed, other customers located on outer State Street and Hogan Road — including the Maine Veterans’ Home, the Dorothea Dix Psychiatric Center, and Eastern Maine Community College — had their service restored.
“The other two cables took until 11:30 p.m. last night” to repair, Nevins said Wednesday.
Asked how the accident occurred, John Murphy, Bangor’s assistant city engineer, said Tuesday that the city is in the design phase of replacing the mid-1800s brick sewer now in place along French Street.
“We are currently doing ledge probes along the path of the sewer project,” he said.
One of those probes hit FairPoint’s cables, which weren’t supposed to be where they were, Murphy said.
Northern Blasting of Corinth is the subcontractor doing the work for the city.
When digging around any possible underground utilities, contractors and homeowners must contact Dig Safe System Inc., a communication network used to ensure underground lines are identified and avoided.
As required under state law, the incident was reported to the Maine Public Utilities Commission, which sent investigators to Bangor to determine where the fault lies, and whether there will be any penalties.
The PUC investigators took photos and measurements of the drilled holes at the site and the location of the fiber-optic conduit banks, said Mark Ward, a city design engineer and manager for the sewer project.
The PUC investigators determined the FairPoint cables were not marked correctly on the street map, he said.
“It was not in the location were it was marked,” Ward said. “The contractor was not liable.”
Ward added that the fiber-optic cables and the PCV pipe used to encase them are hard to detect underground, which may have added to the misidentification.
With so many communications cables running through the area, city crews have determined that a new sewer to replace the 19th century one currently in place may not be possible, Ward said.
“The street is too crowded,” he said, adding a natural gas line is located across the street. “In the long run it’s not the best option for us.”
Design crews now are considering “relining the original brick sewer or using other routes,” Ward said.
The severed lines consist of three cable bundles, two with 72 strands of fiber optics, and one with 48 strands, Nevins said. Each individual strand can handle a number of customers, so the total number of customers who lost phone or Internet service is unknown, he said.
Work on the newly spliced cable lines continued on Wednesday, but Nevins said “it’s not going to affect service.”
Jill McDonald, vice president of communications for Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems, which includes the hospital, said she was pleased with the hospital’s implementation of its emergency preparedness plan.
“It really went very smoothly,” she said. “It wasn’t easy, but it was well managed. It worked the way we would expect it to work because of our plan.”
An emergency preparedness team, which consisted of 12 to 15 people, worked well together to identify and address the communications problem and keep key groups throughout EMHS informed, according to McDonald.
“It was a really good real-life test of our system,“ she said.