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Beneath our feet

As I reported yesterday, internet service to a large chunk of Tokoroa was disrupted for almost two days this week.

Until this sort of thing happens I doubt that any of us give much thought to the amount of technology and critical infrastructure that is buried beneath our feet.

Water pipes, waste-water pipes, electricity supplies, fibre-optic cable, gas mains and probably other stuff I can't think of right now -- it's all lurking just a metre or two under our roads, footpaths and even our back yards.

The problem is, at least if this week's events are any indicator, that a surprising amount of this hidden infrastructure is rather poorly documented and that can pose a real risk when it comes to ensuring continuity of service.

Given that we've seen all the residential fibre installed within the last few years, I was surprised that those laying more wastewater pipes here in town weren't far more aware of exactly where those telecom cables were located.

That they could inadvertently rip up what appeared to be a fairly long run of fibre by accident speaks to a lack of adequate documentation for the fibre or insufficient care on the part of the contractors.

If this was just a simple severing of the fibre then I would have expected that repairs would have taken hours rather than days but unfortunately, a whole city block of new fibre appears to have been required to sort the issues.

A down-side of the switch to fibre is probably the fact that, once it's in the ground, you can't easily locate it using the equivalent of a metal-detector. This is made even worse because a great deal of the fibre was installed, not by trenching but by thrusting. To make the channel for the fibre, a device is forced underground for quite some distance and who knows what deviations it may have taken on its route to the other end. A metre or two one way or the other means it may not actually follow the documented path (if there was a documented path) on the plans.

Bring in a similar device to thrust a channel for much larger wastewater pipes and it's easy to see the potential for disaster if those pipes are to run parallel to the already installed fibre. If the fibre drifts a metre to the left and the pipes drift a metre to the right then disaster awaits.

Now, given that this new pipe is supposed to run around 5Km,from a dairy plant on one side of town to a waste-water treatment plant on the other, I fear that this week's outage may not be the last.

I also worry that as the earth beneath our feet becomes increasingly cluttered with critical infrastructure conduits, we haven't done enough work to ensure that the next lot of such infrastructure to be thrust underground won't result in similar disruptions elsewhere.

To make matters worse, at least when we dug trenches with a digger, any cable damage was usually very limited in scale and easily fixed with a short splice. These days however, the penchant for underground thrusting means that by the time the damage is discovered, hundreds of metres of other infrastructure may have been ruined, requiring far more extensive, costly and time-consuming repairs.

Perhaps we need to do a little more homework when it comes to using the earth beneath our feet as a home for critical infrastructure. I'd also hate to think of the devastation any kind of significant earthquake would produce these days.

Carpe Diem folks!

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