Here we stand at the brink of an extended Labor Day Weekend and with the readership preparing to abandon us for cookouts, campouts, and other general “get outs” as the locals get out of Dodge and head for vacation spots unknown.
Good for you. Just remember you can check on developments here via the mobile device. Sneak off into the bathroom and fire up the phone or something. No one will know.
There was an animal theme to yesterday’s traffic news with roosters strutting their stuff at the Toll Plaza and geese fighting the law and all, but today appears to be a little more sedate on our roadways. So far.
This InterWeb thing of ours allows us to communicate with others pretty far afield and vice versa, with people from far-off lands dialing us up from time to time to say “howdy.” Yesterday we heard from some new friends who live up in Eureka – in the wooded, seaside slice of heaven known to us as The Lost Coast – and were informed of a shared experience.
Those of you following us may remember our reports on cable slashers taking the bolt cutters to telecommunications lines in recent months – and years – and our speculation as to why this was happening. But yesterday we found out we are not alone and that the practice appears to have extended northward, to beautiful, remote locations who rely on their cable for a lot of things – like 9-1-1 communications.
Eureka suffered a total outage in their area yesterday, with AT&T company officials initially blaming the blackout on a “rock slide” near Ukiah. Uh uh. As in our cases, they discovered that their outage occurred when their line was deliberately cut by person or persons unknown.
Earlier this year, before any official announcement, we pondered the succession of outages and wondered what was in play. As it turned out, the FBI has been investigating cable-slashing incidents in and around the Bay Area and communications companies have promised to harden their facilities against such attacks. Judging from yesterday’s incident on the Lost Coast, that infrastructure hasn’t been hardened enough – and the monkey wrenchers may be traveling farther afield to find their targets.
Our question remains: Why? Anyone?
Disgruntled employees?
Or are our fiber optic systems being probed?
Radiation detecting helicopters and fiber optic sabotage. Yay for us. It would be nice to get some real answers for a change.
I can see one or two instances of former employees exacting revenge for some perceived slight — like being fired?? But this appears organized and well planned. It would be nice to know which of the Usual Suspects is behind it.
Just another of the dozen or so other things that make me go hmmmmm!
I assumed cable cutting was combined with recycling fraud. Is this not the case, are they not taking large portions of these cable system away?
Good point, Larry, but they’re not letting us in to see the crime scenes firsthand. There was speculation the felling of the Rocky Ridge Tower was so the monkey wrenchers could access the very expensive communications components on the tower. We agree it would be fairly easy to determine if this was a straightforward metal theft or something more sinister but we haven’t been apprised of the evidence, thus far. We’ll see.
Based on this post we decided last minute to take the RV and go to the Lost Coast for the weekend. Shelter Cove is awesome.
Nice! Hope you had a good trip!
Another one in Livermore. They are not taking anything. This is pure sabotage.