According to Thursday’s Honolulu Advertiser, HPD and Oceanic Time Warner personnel believe copper thieves were responsible for an outage during the Sugar Bowl on Tuesday.
An Oceanic line near the Wilson Tunnel was snagged by a downed tree Tuesday afternoon. Soon afterwards, someone found the cable and bent it open at a 90-degree angle, as if they were looking for copper wiring.
It was a fiber optic line. It’s full of glass strands, without a trace of copper.
When the outage occurred around 5:15 pm HT, my Georgia Bulldogs were leading the Hawaii Warriors 7–3. That was the closest margin that UH could muster. Georgia scored an easy 41–10 victory that made me wonder why the Bulldogs weren’t paired with USC instead. The Trojans would have had a much harder time against Georgia than the Illini.
About half of that line’s fibers remained unbroken as the would-be copper thieves skipped away to darken our island some other day. Backup systems kept 85,000 homes that were using that cable online during the outage, but 5,000 homes in Punaluu, Kaneohe, Kailua and Hawaii Kai were offline for up to an hour.
All 80,000 neighbor island customers were offline for even longer, according to the Advertiser. The outage really wrecked some Sugar Bowl parties. Terrestrial reception on the neighbor islands is spotty at best, so antennas were of little value. When cable service returned, there were reports of poor audio or video.
I was home in Honolulu, where I watched the entire game on my computer via a DSL connection to my cable television box in New Jersey. No worries here!
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