The problem with underground cables...

Seems like a good idea... at least in parts of Florida. Bury the cables. Then if we get a hurricane, they won't be knocked down. The cables will all be nice and snug in there little holes patiently waiting for their powers supplies to be repaired or reconnected. Neighborhoods are prettier, too. No unsightly overhead lines... and believe me, they get pretty unsightly down here.

That is... until you think about the 30-odd inches of rain we get every year in this state. And let's not forget about the tree roots and other things that could break a cable.

At work, our gate system for the parking lot is not working. Water has saturated the cables and shorted-out the wires. None of the remote access boxes work anymore. In fact the sensors have been removed to keep them from walking away. (We're not located in the best of neighborhoods.) Estimates for repair or replacement are in the $10,000.00 range. It's been broken for about 8 months.

At home, it is a slightly more interesting problem.

For some time, our cable TV picture has been less the stellar... especially during football games. More so during popular football games, like the BCS Championship. The picture is broken up by tiling and marco-blocking. Think of the old NHL experiment with putting a "comet tail" on the hockey puck, so the uninitiated could follow the game. Our problem is that football players leave little trails of pixels behind them and the grass morphs into blocks of differentiating green colors... all of which would snap back into clarity a few seconds later. This would happen about every 10-15 seconds. Sometimes faster. It was so bad one day we ended up turning off a Bucs game because it was unwatchable. Every time we called DimShack (the names have been changed to protect the guilty), we would get excuses from its your TV/dIgital cable box/cable line to its the network to "gee, I don't know". We've had DimShack increase the signal power to the repeater, decrease the signal power coming into the house, replace the box, the line, and the modem and some combination of the above at the same time. Nothing worked until finally, the right engineer with the right equipment came out and checked the electromagnetic fields around the buried cables. "There's your problem, the cable is "leaking" into the ground. They'll need to replace the whole thing." In other words, a tree, some water or a mole, for all I know, cracked the cables protective casing and corroded the wires. We're at the beginning of the line for that cable. Theory has it, we should have enough signal not to notice the problem, but folks down the line would be getting crap. Maybe that's why we're seen a lot of Horizon and Hollogy trucks at our neighbors. Our neighbors have just given up on DimShack for cable service, rather then fight the system.

They scheduled to replace the cable within a a few days of diagnosing the problem. They started work yesterday around 2:00 pm. When I got home yesterday they were still diligently working on relaying the cable. They bore under the surface, bypassing sidewalks, streets and sprinkler systems. A hose with what looks like a torpedo at the head is inserted into a starting hole. The torpedo contains a pneumatic drill that thumps its way underground toward a hole they've dug at the other end of their path. It sounds like what I imagine the Thumpers would have sounded like on Dune when they were calling the worms. They're loud. The cats don't like them. I know. Back in Dec, we were woken up by Florida Flash and Flicker as they dug holes in the side yard to replace their power cable, which runs from the telephone pole in the back yard to the distribution box next to the driveway. They used a borer to lay their cable. But that's another story.

I walked out to the guys working beside the cable box when I got home yesterday. "How's it going?" I asked. There were 5 of them out there. One working and the other 4 watching. The fellow in the hole, whom I assumed was the foreman looked up. "The borer is stuck. It's about in the middle of the driveway." That's about 15 feet from the hole. And it's not just not going forward, it's not backing out either. They worked on it for about another 45 minutes last night before giving up, and stringing a temporary line, which they duct taped across the driveway. This morning, they arrived at about 8:00 am. At 1:00, Edward reported they had it out... finally. No, wait, that's a new one. They brought in a second borer. The first one is still under the driveway. They've dug more holes in the front yard then a gopher on a golf course.

They are running the cable in two directions. First, along the the front yard, beside the sidewalk. This cable will run from the junction box at the end of our driveway to the next junction box up the road. Second, they are running a new cable back to the telephone pole in the back yard. Along the same route the power company dug in their cable three weeks ago. They haven't started the second run yet. They're still trying to figure out how to free the first borer. Our side yard continues to look like a grassy version of Swiss cheese, with red stripes where the various utilities have marked where their cables lie.

The job has no doubt taken longer then expected. They've had to call in other help. The first crew called out a supervisor/trouble shooter. Next there was a Hollogy truck. They were trying to help. Turns out the Hollogy cable was out of place and the Dimshack borer took it out. It was their cable that is strung across the driveway and held down with duct tape. Bringing in the second borer means they'll start making progress on the cable replacement again. But they still have the problem of the stuck borer. They've been taking axes to our tree's roots. I'm hoping we don't get any big storms this year. There are four big oak trees out there now. No doubt they had something to do with this. But cutting tree roots is uncool when it comes to standing up in a hurricane. Or it could be the pine trees that were there when we moved in. It's hard to say.

I don't know how long they will work on freeing the borer. Or how many crew it will take to get it free. How many tree roots they will chop up, or if they will crack our sprinkler pipes in the process. I do know that in the end it will likely come down to one question if they can't get it free. Will it cost more to replace the borer, or repair the driveway...?