A Christchurch engineering consultant says the recent major disruption to Telecom’s telecommunications network was “completely preventable”.

Trevor Lord, of the Christchurch-based firm LORD Civil says the prime contributing cause of the fibre optic cable outages to the telecommunications infrastructure were avoidable, in light of given the implementation of a new quality-based programme to increase the level of best practice in underground utility detection. The programme has been developed and promoted throughout the past nine months by LORD Civil, a civil engineering consulting company.

Telecom suffered two fibre outages on June 20 that caused widespread disruptions to services including mobile and internet service and data services including EFT-POS were restored mid-afternoon.
In the first incident, there was physical damage to fibre on a bridge in the Rimutaka area. Services through that fibre were able to be routed through different parts of the network, but a second incident in south Taranaki where a post-hole digger damaged a fibre later in the morning. Telecom said the outage was caused by “an unfortunate coincidence of damage to the network in two places”. Telecom has said it “regrets” the inconvenience to customers caused by the disruptions.

However, Trevor Lord is adamant that both incidents should not have happened in the first place. They would have been avoided, he says, had the stakeholders involved in the maintenance of the fibre network had the will to put a system in place, and had New Zealand’s infrastructure managers aimed for damage prevention rather than consequent repair.
“At the time of the Telecom outage, Mr George Hooper of the Centre for Advanced Engineering suggested that the country should plan for the contingency of infrastructure failures as a result of systems failures or natural disasters,” says Mr Lord.

“But by far the greatest risk to the entire buried infrastructure asset base internationally is from consequential damage from excavation or civil engineering activity. It is very important to understand that almost all such damage is quite preventable, given the simple will of the infrastructure stakeholders to achieve this outcome. 
“While New Zealand lags significantly behind the level and uniformity of 'best practice' seen in most developed countries, the rate of preventable damage in such countries is generally conceded to be higher than acceptable as a result of the quality of effort expended to avoid the outcome,” he says.
“The proposals put forward by our firm, while primarily focused on Australia and New Zealand, are written with the intended scope of promoting an international improvement in best practice.”
Trevor Lord says New Zealand has no mandated procedures to avoid continued recurrences of the events of June 20. “And this simply is unacceptable, given that the solution to the problem is available now and is being implemented to great effect in isolated regions of New Zealand. 

“As demonstrated last month, stakeholders will no longer tolerate such incidents regardless of the scale - the direct and indirect costs of which are typically much higher than widely appreciated. Whereas even minor damage to buried assets can result in a true cost of some $10,000 to the contractor who initiates the incident, damage such as that seen on June 20 is well known to result, even in Australasia, in six figure claims against the contractor.”
Mr Lord says parallel health and safety issues, general disruption to the normal flow of society, undue burdening of emergency services, and possible longer-term secondary damage in such cases are all of major concern and increasing focus to the country.
“Mr Hooper does make the point clearly that the interdependence of the buried infrastructure can result in spectacularly-compounded effects from infrastructure damage but, while the various infrastructure owners do implement design initiatives to minimise the outcome of damage, the outcomes are not always containable to idealised levels. 

“Quite clearly, the point to make most strongly here is that prevention (via better work practices)is far better, and more readily achieved, than the cure - from an added design standpoint or the implementation of new additional technology in the infrastructure to attempt to minimise such effects. We have the processes on the table, the proven approaches to achieve this outcome, and lack only the will of the Industry to embrace and implement the procedures proposed.”

Trevor Lord says “given suitable will” a wide-spread implementation of the LORD Civil proposals is possible by the end of this year.