As I was sitting at my computer thinking about the topic for this month’s column—safety—the floor, my desk and my chair began shaking. An earthquake! It lasted a long time, maybe 10 to 15 seconds. The My Shake app on my phone said the quake was a magnitude 4.7, with the epicenter less than 20 miles away. Not quite “The Big One” that Californians worry about, but enough to make anyone edgy.  

Earlier in the week, it was rain. Here in Santa Monica, we got almost 7 inches of rain in three days, about half our average annual rainfall. Not far away, coincidentally near the epicenter of the quake, it rained nearly 13 inches in the Santa Monica Mountains. 

In the Los Angeles area, there was localized flooding and mudslides, requiring many rescues. It will be months before all the roads are cleared. Areas in the Sierra Nevada mountains got 4 feet of snow or more.

In another six months, it will be wildfires we will be worrying about. California, of course, is not alone. Every part of the country has been hit with so many “thousand-year storms” that this term needs to be retired.

Last year, I was surprised to receive a call from an employee with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which recruits workers to help rebuild areas hit by disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes and floods. The FEMA employee was interested in information on how to restore fiber optic communications in these areas.

The Fiber Optic Association has plenty of information on restoring networks after cable breaks, but that’s usually just a couple of techs splicing some cables back together—a process that can usually be completed in a day or less. My discussion with FEMA went a lot deeper, including what would be needed to replace an entire cable plant destroyed in a disaster and how one might design and build fiber optic communications systems to withstand natural disasters.

Disaster response concerns

Until this conversation, I assumed the first concerns in disaster response would be water, food and shelter, but I learned that delivering aid depended heavily on communications and power. Without them, bringing aid to a disaster area and delivering it can be very difficult. Therefore, it makes sense that planning for disasters should be considered an important task for those responsible for communications and power providers.

Wildfires, winds and more

In California, wildfires are a serious problem. Summer and fall are dry, and we often get high winds from the desert—the famous Santa Ana winds. For the last few fire seasons, a major cause of wildfires has been electrical wires being blown down or into trees, igniting dry vegetation. 

The cost to electrical utilities has been so high that many are replacing wood poles with metal. Some are even considering burying transmission and distribution wires. The cost of this is astronomical, but so is the cost of wildfires burning millions of acres and destroying whole towns.

Assessing the damage

I have a collection of photos of utility poles that have fallen during storms. Hurricanes and tornadoes often have winds capable of toppling rows of poles at a time. 

One photo shows a six-lane highway blocked by poles blown down in a storm, trapping dozens of cars in a mesh of high-voltage cables. In Southern California, I have seen fiber optic cables after wildfires burned utility poles. Sometimes the poles are burned right to the ground, leaving the fiber optic cables laying on the ground—in some cases, still operational!

It’s not just aerial cables that have problems in disasters. Underground cable plants can get flooded, ruining equipment. I have been sent pictures of splice closures and maintenance holes flooded and frozen in the winter. When a maintenance hole freezes solid in zero-degree weather, repair is likely going to wait until spring.

Cities near the coast also deal with rising sea levels and salt water intrusion into systems. This occurred when saltwater contamination from Hurricane Sandy ruined communications equipment in New York and New Jersey.

About now, you might be expecting some advice on how to plan your communications systems for disasters, but nobody, including yours truly, has the answers yet. The fiber optics industry is just beginning to discuss disaster planning with people who are interested, involved or affected to try to make sense of this serious problem.

my shake