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As I told you in my last OPALCOGRAM, we cut the cable on the San Juan end, rolled up 8,500 feet, cut out the bad area, spliced the cable together and relaid it back to San Juan. Sounds simple? It really is a complex process that marries the latest high tech with plain old brute strength. This submarine cable has been in service for 18 years. The marine environment had taken its toll on the cable. The armor which protects the cable is galvanized to help preserve it. In some areas, the galvanizing was in good condition -- far better than we expected. In other areas, the galvanizing was gone and the armor wires were badly corroded and, in a few cases, corroded completely through to the point where one or more armor wires were broken. Working with submarine cables is like flying an airplane -- 95 percent routine and five percent panic. One of the most exciting times came on the fourth morning while we were still picking up the cable. A sudden increase in the tension on the power cable told us that something was amiss down below -- at about a 270 foot depth. As part of the process, we had a small, remotely controlled submarine (called an ROV) with a TV camera, that we sent down to take a look for us. What we found was a fishing net wrapped around our cable several times and then wrapped around a fiber optic telephone cable. If we raised the power cable high enough for divers to cut the net loose, we would break the telephone cable. Fortunately, the ROV we were using had a remotely controlled arm and pincer. After a quick trip to town, a couple of kitchen knives turned the pincer into a pair of high tech scissors. By 10:00 p.m. that night the fishing net had been cut free. By 2:00 a.m. Saturday morning, the cable had been recovered several hundred feet past the damaged area and laid along a new route to bypass the area which caused the damage. We had originally estimated that 185 to 220 feet of damaged cable would need to be removed. The damage was far more extensive than anticipated and 264 feet were cut out of the cable. After the cable was spliced back together, it was laid on a new route back to San Juan. We used the ROV to examine the cable as it was relaid to make sure there were no bad areas on the bottom. We are currently splicing in a 200 foot piece of spare cable to reach to the terminal. The final testing of the cable is scheduled for September 28th or 29th. After that we will know if our repair efforts were successful. If the testing is satisfactory, we will take a short outage in early October to put the cable back in service.
Doug Bechtel
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