What Idiot Did This?

[ThePhoneGoddess]

It depends. If the contractor called the One-Call Center for a Utility Ticket, waited the required 48 hours, was told everything around his proposed route was marked and he hit an unmarked or mismarked line then it's the responsibility of the utility marker. However, if the contractor dug without a Ticket, didn't wait the required time, hit a properly marked line or used a machine too close to the marks then he's in _big_ trouble.

eltf177 is correct. I used to work for the Oregon One-Call Center. Whoever was digging better have had the lines marked, or he'd be in a huge amount of trouble and you can bet your ass the phone company's gonna take him for a lot of money.

If he did have the lines marked but they were wrong, then it's utility marker's fault and HE'S gonna have his ass inserted into a sling by his bosses.

The utility companies pay a lot of money, as do the local governments, to run those one-call centers, because it saves everyone so much money and hassle to MAKE SURE where the lines are before you dig. Anything gets screwed up and there will be a witch hunt. I've seen it happen.

[BearLeeBadenaugh]

Idjits and large machines

Reminds me of when I was geeking for a living. At the time, I was living nearly 4 hours from the main office, storing my gear at my home and hitting main on average once a month, unless a call sent me down that way. My boss calls me up, tells me we've got an emergency call, and that I needed to load up for a "major fiber repair" and get moving, and that he'd meet me there with extra consumables and a reel of fiber.

I get to the site and discover an amazing set of Oopses. Seems the factory was having a section of floor redone because they were replacing a few machines, and it needed to handle the greater weight of the new machines. In the process of tearing out about a 1/4 acre of concrete, the construction crew ripped right through a conduit containing 72 pairs of fiber.

What a set of repairs that was. We had to trace, check continuity, and label both ends of every line before I could even start splicing them back together. It took my boss, a coworker, and myself most of a day to get that portion done. I was the only one who was fiber certified, so I got to stick around in the mess, while my boss was in the patch bay, and jim was running from connection to connection in the factory. I still can't believe how much we lucked out. Out of 144 lines of fiber, we only had 7 lines where we couldn't locate the damage and had to repull. The rest of the lines, the faults were findable in the section exposed by the damage to the conduit. Of course, since I had to trim a bit of damage from every line, they no longer met up and I had to splice in a jumper of new fiber. All told, it was nearly 300 splices and close to a full day before I was done. At least we had a fusion splicer, if I'd had to use mechanical splices it probably would've taken close to a week.

Sorry for the length and hijack,

Bear

[Dreamstalker]

Yeah, AT&T is bizarre.

Both my mom and I have AT&T, and there is no signal at all in my apartment until you get outside (in odd contrast, my dad has Sprint and gets service in my apartment fine, but can't get AT&T where he lives*). I can detect my upstairs neighbor's wireless network, so I don't think it's a problem with the building (at first we thought that older building=materials were interfering with RF).

* we dropped Sprint due to lack of coverage and also the lack of tech service...it seemed that since we had Nextel Motorolas which are in theory indestructible, nothing should ever go wrong

At college, the lines (either Ethernet, phone or both) would get cut an average of once a semester, by contractors hired by the school to do something or other. One would think that the school knows where their own cables are.

[LostMyMind]

eltf177 is correct. I used to work for the Oregon One-Call Center.

It all depends, every state have different laws regarding "call before dig". I've dealt with Florida and Georgia onecall center (strangely enough, the locator's ticket/map software is I used to write).

I also know that there are quite a few companies think they don't have to follow the onecall rules (DoT is one example).

My bet, DoT was the violator. They needed to dig for something and called a ticket in for a 5 mile stretch and just went ahead and dug. At least that the common thing in Florida.

[Kogarashi]

Both my mom and I have AT&T, and there is no signal at all in my apartment until you get outside (in odd contrast, my dad has Sprint and gets service in my apartment fine, but can't get AT&T where he lives*). I can detect my upstairs neighbor's wireless network, so I don't think it's a problem with the building (at first we thought that older building=materials were interfering with RF).

My Sprint phone doesn't like to pick up much signal inside my apartment, yet gets great service just outside in the courtyard. Inside, I get maybe 2 bars out of 6, and that's usually if I stand near the window, and calls like to drop a lot. But outside I get all 6 bars and perfect reception. The wireless internet works fine, but it's University-provided, so that might have something to do with it.

At my parents' house, it used to be that I only got reception on the second floor, and spotty at that, but they must've built a new tower closer to them because I get middling reception on both floors now.

And when we were in Hawaii for a week this July (yay!), I got no reception at our condo, but perfect reception 15 minutes up the road to one of the nearby small towns. Judging by Sprint's maps, Sprint coverage in Kauai is spotty and Nextel is better.