Los Alamos residents experienced their second communications blackout in a week when contractors severed another Lumen Technologies fiber optic line Monday while working on the NM 4 water transmission line replacement project. The latest outage occurred in a different location — about 1,000 feet — from the March 11 incident, but both outages happened while crews worked on the same construction project.
County officials said that upon investigation, they determined Lumen had properly followed a tracer wire used to mark the underground fiber cable, but wire and fiber still separated for unknown reasons. “Without tracer wire attached, fiber optic line has no traceable signal for locators to detect,” said a press release from the County’s public information office. “The separation of the two was not something that could be detected during the underground locate and line marking process.”
In other words, even though contractors were following proper line location protocols, the fiber optic c…
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