The
“telecommunications break” which Duneland Schools parents have been
receiving notifications about--asking them only to call their child’s school
in an emergency--wasn’t so much a break, in fact, as it was a severing.
It happened on
Wednesday morning, when a contractor digging a hole for a new sign at the
Westchester Township History Museum, 700 W. Porter Ave.--formerly the
Duneland Schools admin building--cut a Frontier phone cable serving the
schools and bundling hundreds of separate strands, Assistant Superintendent
Monte Moffett told the Chesterton Tribune.
As Moffett
understands the incident, the contractor’s excavator did call 811
before turning dirt.
He just didn’t wait
until a locate had been made, and hit the Frontier cable approximately two
feet below the surface. Had he waited, the locator would’ve flagged not only
the Frontier cable but a nearby NIPSCO line as well.
“He was very
lucky,” Moffett noted.
The severed cable
has affected neither the Duneland Schools’ Internet service nor its internal
phone system. But it has bottlenecked external calls coming in.
Repairing the
damage, in the meantime--each strand will have to be spliced “in the hole,
by hand”--is proving more complicated than anyone initially expected,
Moffett said. Because while Frontier was able to quick-fix a temporary
bypass which returned normal phone service to the Duneland Schools, every
time the severed cable was touched and the cut strands jostled, the bypass
shorted out.
For the moment
Frontier has stabilized the cable and may end up having to schedule a
permanent repair outside school hours, when a renewed disruption in phone
service won’t be noticed.
The sign
contractor, Moffett added, is picking up the tab for repairs.