Internet access and 911 service trickled back to residents
during the night, which passed with no major incidents, police
said.
Internet access and 911 service trickled back to residents during the night, which passed with no major incidents, police said.
As the sun rose after a disorienting day without ATMs, texting, cable TV, e-mail and credit cards, extra police officers returned home and shut down the city’s emergency command center, and AT&T upped its bounty from $100,000 to $250,000 for the phone line bandit or bandits, whom the FBI and San Jose and San Carlos police departments are still searching for.
“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 and an AT&T spokesperson. It was this act of sabotage that primarily caused the massive cell phone, land line and Internet outage in the South Valley that left residents without communication and left businesses operating on a cash-only basis. 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 the wet underground pathways to snip essential AT&T lines, Cinfio said. Police are looking into potential footage from red light cameras near the two manholes, but it will be a week before police know if video exists. As of yet, there were no “solid leads,” Cinfio said.
“It was clean cut straight through,” Cinfio said of the truncated cable he saw dangling underground – something that definitely required more than scissors but probably nothing elaborate or motorized, he said. Removing the city’s standard street manhole simply required a crowbar and some muscle to pry off, Cinfio said, but Britton said removing the heavy seal takes a more a 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 are 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 return messages Friday, and Santa Clara County District Attorney Spokesperson Amy Cornell nodded to the likely vandalism charge but otherwise declined to speculate.
All told, 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 southern Santa Clara County. Customers of Verizon Wireless and Sprint wireless – which also 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 also affected, as were Verizon Wireless users in southern Santa Clara 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. It wasn’t until about 8:30 a.m. that police and AT&T staff realized the San Carlos lines had been 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. Britton estimated more than 100,000 people were affected in the resulting service interruptions.
“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.”
City Administrator Tom Haglund said Friday he had not heard any reports from staff about city projects, bids or grant submittals falling victim to the telecommunication blackout, which generally lifted about 8 p.m. That’s about when police met at the Emergency Operations Center across City Hall at Sixth and Rosanna streets and conferred with the 15 to 20 city emergency managers, HAM radio volunteers, California Highway Patrol officers, Santa Clara Sheriff’s Office deputies, Cal Fire firefighters and Red Cross officials, all of whom decided to put the center in standby mode until it was shut down 12 hours later.
As the night began, residents running errands and eating at restaurants also reported a general return to normality. That included 911 service, which came back online about the same time. Dispatchers spent most of Thursday answering phones through the department’s business line, but they could not see time-saving caller ID information that normally comes through on 911 calls. The return to full operation relieved the doubled shift of officers patrolling the streets during the pre-dawn hours.
“Everything went fine – nothing big happened,” Sgt. John Sheedy said.
Phones at The Dispatch were still acting up Friday, but lines at City Hall and businesses around town seemed to work fine.
All the 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 wrapped around it, he said. Britton declined to talk about 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.
“Wires stretch across America, and you can’t put a cop on every cable,” Britton said.
Within each of the chopped lines runs a bundle of glass fiber strands, each one about as thick as a human hair. The smallest bundle contained 48 fibers, and the largest one that was cut Thursday contained 360 such fibers. Each hair-sized fiber can carry about 300 to 400 telephone calls, Britton said. But phone calls take up less space than other information the glass strands carry, such as ATM transactions, data, videos and other files passing through the Internet.
As to why the snipping of a subterranean cable would disrupt wireless cell phone 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, where the call would proceed through the air until it reaches the targeted phone.
The lines that were cut yesterday are the kind that, within the vast network of telecommunications transmission vehicles, 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 – hence the all day operation.
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.
With the FBI and two local departments on the case, though, Cinfio said he remained encouraged and said the cooperation among the agencies has been just as impressive as the phone companies’ quick response.
“It’s been outstanding. They’ve really reached out to us, and we’re in constant communication with all the departments,” said Cinfio, who has served on the force for 28 years. “And the effort of the phone companies – just as a private citizen … who relies on the Internet and phone systems – it was very impressive.”
View Cables cut in San Jose in a larger map
