Those attempting to access their landlines or the internet in northeastern Jefferson County got an unpleasant surprise on Friday, Aug. 2, when a fiber line was unintentionally cut.

The Jefferson County Department of Emergency Management issued three advisories about the widespread network outage on its Nixle system that day, the first at 12:32 p.m. noting that phone and internet systems had been affected, and adding that PenCom in Clallam County would be answering 911 calls instead of JeffCom, whose non-emergency line was unavailable.

At 2:52 p.m., the first update to that advisory was issued, informing the public that Jefferson County Public Utility District 1 was reporting that the main fiber line to the network hub was damaged by underground work on Ness’ Corner Road, and adding that crews were working to repair it, but warning that the internet outage could continue through the early evening.

This estimate proved overly optimistic, because by 9:07 p.m., the DEM’s second update to its original advisory stated that the damage to the underground fiber cable was “severe and extensive,” enough that the PUD reported its crews’ work would continue “well into the night” to run a new cable overhead, to replace what had been “a main internet supply path,” in and out of northeastern Jefferson County.

Although internet service was restored that night, Will O’Donnell, the broadband and communications director for the PUD, nonetheless felt badly over the businesses that had to close down “on a busy Friday night, in early August,” because they could not run their POS (point of sale) systems or payment platforms.

“Even those that stayed open, their jobs were a lot harder,” O’Donnell said. “The whole point of these systems is to support our local economy, to make work easier, and to be able to do more with less, so we hope to work with whomever we can, to help build up some more resiliency.”

O’Donnell likewise acknowledged how the internet outage affected the hospital, emergency services, county government and the PUD itself, after a telecommunications provider’s boring contractor struck the underground fiber optic line while working along the south side of Ness’ Corner Road, between 11:30-11:45 a.m. that Friday.

“It didn’t just break in one place,” O’Donnell said. “It got twisted around the drilling shaft, and destroyed thousands of feet of fiber line, from Chimacum Creek Primary back to Rhody Drive.”

This line was connected to another line, not owned by the PUD, that takes internet traffic off the peninsula, across the Hood Canal Bridge, for Jefferson PUD, Astound Broadband and others.

O’Donnell estimated the outage affected “less than 100 Jefferson PUD customers, and “perhaps all” of Astound — “We have not had an official report from them,” he added — as well as other carriers and providers that leased services over those lines, from the PUD and others.

“We estimate it affected internet service for almost half of the county,” said O’Donnell, who further estimated it took the PUD 12 hours to restore service, and 18 hours to install a replacement fiber and complete all the splicing. “Our line crew had to come in and hang the new fiber up high in the power space, and our three network technicians worked 18 hours straight to complete the fiber repairs, to tie the network back together. Fiber repair is interesting work.”

O’Donnell said that technicians had to laser-weld together more than 200 pairs of “tiny, hair-sized” glass strands, which also engaged the support of “most” of the PUD’s broadband department, with members of other departments also pitching in.

“We also had to bring in flaggers from our warehouse, as the work was being done alongside the road all through the night,” O’Donnell said. “PUD staff are dedicated. I was very proud of the effort.”

O’Donnell considers it “lucky” the PUD was able to install an overhead cable, to reroute the one destroyed underground, since it allowed them to restore service “as fast as possible.”

O’Donnell added, “It won’t often be that simple. The contractor who did the damage will still need to replace the underground section. We don’t have a total expense to date, but we will next week. It’s not cheap.

O’Donnell explained that the PUD has already been building “redundancy and failovers” in its new fiber optic network, under construction at Quilcene, Gardiner and Chimacum.

“We plan to have multiple solutions, to prevent outages like this from being as widespread, and lasting as long as they did, in the coming weeks and months,” O’Donnell said. “I can’t speak for the other carriers that lost service.”

When asked what phone or internet users should keep in mind during a service outage, O’Donnell noted that, “unlike an electrical outage, where too much demand for power at the same time can damper restoration efforts, this was an issue of needing to rebuild a long section of line, that was obliterated from the network. There was not a lot that internet users could do.”

He added, “There were some calls from tech-savvy folks online, to avoid overloaded local cellular networks, but some of those networks were hampered by the loss of fiber backhaul as well. It was a tough situation.”