No post from the Boggy Thicket yesterday, but there was a good reason. When I got up yesterday, I discovered that we had no DSL, and checking further, that our phone lines were completely dead.
I used my cell phone to call the phone company, and after navigating the maze put up by the automated response computer, and being subjected to several minutes of really bad symphonic music on hold, I finally reached the right live person and a repairman was dispatched.
It didn’t take him long to discover the problem – Copper Thieves!
After Hurricane Ike, the phone company installed underground cables in our area and phone service has been uninterrupted ever since – much better than it ever was before.
Uninterrupted until Friday night, when sometime during the night, thieves hit every connection pedestal in our neighborhood, stealing all the wire that they could reach.
Considering that they hit about a dozen pedestals, the amount of wire inside and the small (14 gauge)size of the telephone wire they stole, they couldn’t have netted more than $5.00 worth of copper, but the cost to the phone company was easily into the thousands of dollars.
They had to send out crews with backhoes to dig out each pedestal and uncover enough cable to be able to splice it, then there were the actual linemen called out to do the splicing and to reinstall and reconnect the wires at the pedestals. They had crews working from about 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. – over a dozen men at the height of the activity – and all drawing overtime for work on a holiday weekend.
I talked to one of the contractors this morning on Easter Sunday. He said they put pen to paper and figured that the thieves did steal only about $5.00 worth of copper. However, it cost customers a little over $20,000.00 to repair. And that cost will likely go up.
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