Outside of a slow day at work for some local businesses and a
busy day for emergency personnel, there were no major incidents in
Morgan Hill during Thursday’s telecommunications outage.
Outside of a slow day at work for some local businesses and a busy day for emergency personnel, there were no major incidents in Morgan Hill during Thursday’s telecommunications outage that knocked out land phones and cell service, 911 call centers, Internet access, ATMs, and credit card machines throughout south Santa Clara County, according to police, city staff and residents.
And AT&T, the owner of 10 fiber optic cables that police say were intentionally cut in San Jose and San Carlos, increased its bounty to $250,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the phone line vandal or vandals who police are still looking for, said an AT&T spokesman.
Morgan Hill Police Cmdr. David Swing said he didn’t hear of any major incidents of crime, fire or medical emergencies that were missed by responders while 911 was down. The city’s Emergency Operations Center, where police, fire chiefs and city staff gathered to coordinate their response, was disbanded about 8:30 p.m., and the extra officers called in to canvass the streets were taken off duty.
“Everyone performed admirably,” said Swing, who noted there wasn’t even a spike in call volume after the local 911 line was transferred to the police station’s business line Thursday morning. “The fact that we didn’t have people take advantage of this lapse in communications and use it as an opportunity to commit crimes speaks of the overall value of the community.”
Furthermore, the California Highway Patrol’s dispatch center in Salinas was not affected by the phone outage, and officer Matt Peters said Monday there were no major traffic accidents Thursday.
Assemblymember Bill Monning, who serves the legislative district that includes Morgan Hill, said he will support a formal investigation into the cause of the outage and look for ways to prevent such ruptures from happening again.
“The fact that the severing of communications lines appears to be intentional is outrageous and constitutes not only apparent criminal activity, but also wanton disregard for people’s lives,” Monning said in a statement. “This acts as a wake up call to our vulnerability, and the need to develop backup communications systems.”
The cause and extent of the phone disruption that lasted from about 1:30 a.m. until about 8 p.m. was unclear to those with little access to the outside world Thursday. But as phone service and Internet access trickled in, so did details of the sabotage.
“Multiple suspects is a likelihood, but it’s hard to say at this point,” said Richard Cinfio, a police commander in San Carlos, where four underground fiber optic cables were cut in two separate locations a few hundred yards apart on Old County Road about 3:30 a.m. Thursday.
Six additional lines were cut at two spots near the intersection of Blossom Hill Road and Monterey Highway in south San Jose about 1:30 a.m. Thursday, according to police. This act of vandalism primarily caused the massive phone and Internet outage in the South Valley. The severed cables in San Carlos contributed to the service interruption, said AT&T spokesman John Britton.
In San Carlos, the saboteur or saboteurs pried off manholes in the middle of the street and climbed into wet underground pathways to snip AT&T lines, Cinfio said. Police are looking into potential footage from cameras at intersections near the two manholes, but it will be several days before police know if video exists.
“It was clean cut straight through,” Cinfio said of the truncated cable he saw dangling underground – something that required more than scissors but probably nothing elaborate or motorized, he said. Removing the city’s standard street manhole simply requires a crowbar and some muscle to pry off, Cinfio said, but Britton said removing the heavy seal used by AT&T takes a more specialized tool.
Sgt. Ronnie Lopez of the San Jose Police Department said authorities are confident the incidents are connected. The very least of the charges the potential suspect or suspects could face is felony vandalism, he added, though more charges could pile up if police find the lack of phone service, particularly 911, resulted in death, injury or widespread theft.
Saint Louise Regional Hospital representative Jasmine Nguyen did not immediately return messages Monday. Lopez said there was no unusual spike of activity at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center emergency room.
In all, 52,214 Verizon landline customers lost service in southern Santa Clara County, according to Jon Davies, a spokesman with Verizon, which is the sole provider of land lines in South County. Customers of Verizon Wireless and Sprint Wireless – which rely on the lines AT&T owns to convey calls on their networks – also could not make calls until the evening. T-Mobile and AboveNet customers were affected, as were Verizon Wireless users in South County and from Watsonville to Scotts Valley in Santa Cruz County.
AT&T first discovered four broken lines when phone and Internet service to tens of thousands of residents in southern Santa Clara County began to drop. About 8:30 a.m. police and AT&T staff realized the San Carlos lines were cut and it was not until 4 p.m. that AT&T found that two more fiber optic lines had been cut in San Jose, a few hundred yards from the initial location, Britton said.
“I can’t understand the motivation why someone did this,” Britton said, noting that it was not for financial gain as no property such as expensive copper wire was stolen from the vandalism scenes. “What I do know is the person who did this has no idea of the widespread implications. Thousands of people were inconvenienced out of a deliberate criminal act, and we have zero tolerance.”
By Friday morning, life and commerce returned to normal in Morgan Hill, though some were completely shut down Thursday.
Nancy Meyer, who runs ranch sales business Twin Oaks Ranch Mfg. out of her home in San Martin, said without phones, Internet, fax machines and banks, she was unable to do business.
The same was the case for Gary Jinks, a Morgan Hill resident who runs his military consulting business from his home. “I couldn’t work at all (Thursday),” said Jinks, who described his bewilderment as he noticed, one by one, each of his communications devices running on Verizon and Sprint was unable to get a signal.
While many local banks closed in response to the disruption which rendered ATMs and account-tracking computer systems useless, Wells Fargo in downtown Morgan Hill stayed open.
“We gave up to $100 to customers that showed us their debit card and driver’s license. People had to buy gas and groceries,” Manager Trevor Feichtmann said Friday.
Most local restaurants did not report a slowdown in business. The only thing they had to do differently was make manual carbon copies of credit cards, and electronically enter them the following day.
Cindy Gilchrist, an employee at Hot Java coffee shop on Monterey Road, said the store’s wireless Internet access, free for patrons, was down. She noticed people were talking to each other more than usual Thursday.
Ironically, emergency personnel relied on the 1900s-era technology of two-way radios to communicate during the outage. Swing noted the importance of local volunteer amateur radio operators who helped in the response by establishing communication points at various points throughout the community. Those connections are what allowed Morgan Hill police to stay in contact with the Santa Clara County and Gilroy EOCs.
All the phone lines that were cut were eight to 10 feet underground and accessible only through the manhole covers, Britton said. The lines varied in thickness but the biggest one was about as thick in diameter as a 50-cent piece and had a heavy plastic sheath around it, he said. Britton declined to discuss any specific and additional security measures AT&T may be considering to make such crimes less likely in the future, but he said the company will continue to work with federal and state agencies as it has in the past whenever security flags have popped up – or not, as in this case.
Within each of the lines runs a bundle of glass fiber strands, each one about as thick as a human hair. The largest bundle that was cut Thursday housed 360 such fibers. Each hair-sized fiber can carry about 300 to 400 telephone calls, Britton said.
As to why the snipping of a subterranean cable would disrupt wireless networks, Britton explained that cell tower sites transmit a lot of the information they receive to central offices through high-speed land lines. If a cell phone user is attempting to contact another cell phone, for example, the central office would then transmit the call to another cell site via the underground lines. From the cell tower, the call would proceed through the air until it reached the targeted phone.
The lines that were cut Thursday are the kind that end up carrying about 80 percent of all cell phone traffic, Britton said. To restore service, repair crews had to splice each of the fiber optic strands by hand.
As far as potential suspects, Britton said AT&T does not have anyone specific in mind, and the company does not believe that the Communication Workers of America labor union was involved in the sabotage, as some news reports have suggested. A contract between the union and AT&T expired late Saturday night.
“We know someone intentionally cut the cables. If we knew who did it (the police) would arrest them, and we hope the police get some good leads out of the reward we have offered.” Britton said.
