No love on Valentine's day for some.

[Gerry]

On Tues. 14th a digger operator suffered what must be his most miserable Valentine's day ever.

There's a very large building operation going on here to add additional tracks to a busy railway line. On Tuesday, while drilling holes to take concrete supports in the ground a digger operator managed to sever 4 (four) major glass fibre cables. As a result of this mishap more than 200 flights had to be cancelled at Frankfurt airport and most of Frankfurt was left without Telephone, Internet and cable TV reception. By Tues. evening the Airport was starting to get back online but it took until this morning for most other services to get restored. We still don't have TV but Internet and Telephone were restored early today.

None of the stores in our Shopping centre could accept Bank or Credit cards, and those without cash had to try and find a cash machine working somewhere outside the northern area of the city because the ones here, along with the few Banks still available, couldn't process cash withdrawals.

A spokesperson for the Airport said that he hoped that the construction company employing the digger had high enough liability insurance to cover the expected double million Euro damage claims.

There are days when you wish you had just stayed in bed. 😣😖😭

[Keith-369]

Not the digger drivers fault, he only digs where he's told to. It's the fault of the clever people who plan (?) these things and who are supposed to find/know where all the cables, pipes etc are.

Not a good situation though regardless of who is to blame.

[MJ224]

As a surveyor, we were the clever ones...thus 10 million insurance...

Mapping of services was usually inaccurate, to say the least, and Ground Radar is often very difficult to interpret...

I always tried to increase my business footprint by selling an "as Built " survey, using GPS, but was rarely taken up on that. Too expensive was the excuse. Thus I am not as well off as I wanted to be..

[Melaka]

Serves Frankfurt right! A big city like that should not be so reliant on one duct's worth of fibre optics. There are lessons to be learnt.

[Gerry]

It has nothing to do with Frankfurt, the lines belong to the Telekom, Vodafon and O² among others.

[Melaka]

Maybe, but relying on one duct for all your communication needs is unwise, indeed foolish.

[wanderer]

In the old days, metal pipe underground was relatively easy to pinpoint. It makes one wonder whether fibre optic (presumably metal less) should have a small copper cable included.

[Ian]

I saw this in the news - sounds like a nightmare!

Ian

[BDennis]

This is the modern world it seems. A digger operator can cause so much chaos because a lot of stuff is fragile to a small piece of infrastructure going down.

Tried to buy lunch out once and was looking at the food cooking at the take-away place but they couldn't sell it to us because their payment machine had been taken out by a lightning storm - "oh no, we're not allowed to take cash sir, we will have to throw this food away" they said! Our credit cards and cash were useless.

Bill