A CenturyLink technician works to repair a cable in his service van Monday that was inadvertently cut earlier that morning at the job site along N.M. 4. For the second time in a week, the community experienced a network service outage. Both outages occurred when fiber lines were broken during construction for the N.M. 4 Water Transmission Line Replacement/Fiber Conduit Installation Project between the N.M. 502 (truck route) intersection and White Rock. Monday’s fiber break occurred when Wagner Construction, the contractor for the project managed by the Los Alamos utilities department, was trenching for pipeline installation. While adhering to the path indicated by maps and located by Lumen, Wagner’s equipment unexpectedly cut the Lumen-owned fiber line. Upon investigation, Lumen’s locator had properly followed the tracer wire to mark the underground fiber, however that wire and fiber had been separated for unknown reasons at some point in the past. Without tracer wire attached, fiber optic line has no traceable signal for locators to detect. Photo by John McHale/ladailypost.com

A technician at the site explained that the severed cable that caused Monday’s outage is the black conduit shown here and the new cable is the orange conduit, adding that the new conduit has a tracer wire to help workers locate it. Photo by John McHale/ladailypost.com

Cables along the ground and a CenturyLink truck at the job site Monday on N.M. 4. Photo by John McHale/ladailypost.com