A Week Of Chaos, Noise, and Destruction

In the name of progress, our little rural phone co-op is entering the world of fiber optics. Most of the folks in the county have their power and communications lines strung from pole to pole to house. When we built nearly 2 decades ago, we chose to run ours underground for appearance and safety sake.

Well progress finally reached us and the initial contractor hung a huge loop of the cable on the pole in the right of way at the top of our driveway. We figured that would be the cable run to the house eventually, also figuring we would be asked/told we had to pay for it. About 2 weeks ago, a representative of the electricity provider came and marked the power line from the pole to where it entered the house. We pointed out that an additional line ran from the house to the well head, under the front yard and driveway, underground up a slope and eventually to the well. His response was that wasn’t his responsibility and the cable contractor would have to mark that. Fortunately, we were here when they first arrived to begin to bury the fiber optic line as they had no means of locating the power and water lines. Their decision was to run it on the outer edge of the power marking which then took it around the cedar trees that have grown up around the transformer box and old phone line pedestal.

Last week with a much smaller robotic ditch witch, they installed the line from the house to the new pedestal about where the back of the large red ditch witch is parked. Several days ago, the brought two trailers in, one with the ditch witch, the other with the yellow backhoe and began laying the cable to 18″ deep. As I have mentioned before, this county’s main “crop” is rocks. You can’t hammer in a T post or dig a hole without hitting rocks, some the size of a small car. As a result of their efforts, the side of our driveway has been torn up, large rocks dug up with the backhoe whenever the ditch witch encountered one, creating more areas of destroyed grass. This late afternoon, they finally got to the pedestal from the top of the driveway and have sprinkled grass seed and a little bit of straw over the raw areas. There has been no respect for our upper field and lawn areas as they drive wherever in their trucks, park in the grass, leave trailers and spools of cable in the grass. With any luck, all the equipment will be loaded and hauled out tomorrow before we have several days of forecast rain. I expect we will have muddy rivulets running down the driveway and new gullies created.

The positive, is we didn’t directly have to pay to have this run, but I’m sure we will see a significant fee increase once it becomes operational and maybe we will have high speed internet.