Sabotage was behind the cable outage across Colorado “affecting hundreds of thousands of people, from Chipita Park to Fountain.” All it took was a single anarchist with a Sawzall to knock out internet and television over a wide area. Comcast is reporting the facts but mainstream media aren’t going out of their way to actually tell anyone.
Sabotage in Colorado Springs
The sabotage was caught on security cameras and is being reviewed by police as Comcast workers tediously splice cables back together one-by-one. They’ve been hard at work to restore service to thousands of customers but it’s not an easy task.
The media don’t want disgruntled Americans to know that knocking out major communications systems can be so easy to do and so hard to repair. Nobody is speculating yet if this attack is related in any way to recent ones on power stations.
Status Symbol Auto Body had a security camera pointing in the right direction to show the sabotage in progress. Right around 3:00 a.m. Wednesday morning a person was filmed severing fiber network cables behind the shop.
Comcast officials reassured Colorado Springs residents on Thursday that their network is secure after tens of thousands of customers across the city lost services for more than 12 hours Wednesday following vandalism to the Comcast fiber line west of… https://t.co/01uoCCdgCP
— The Gazette (@csgazette) January 13, 2023
According to police, the suspect “who was driving a burgundy Dodge truck, drove past the shop a couples times before getting out of the car.”
Police also note for the record “it took them about ten seconds to cut the cables, using a tool that is believed to be a Sawzall.” The sabotage was instantly effective.
“The instant these were severed, we had an outage,” Comcast contractor Patrick Bendele relates. He’s construction coordinator at the repair site. It’s not a simple fix, he explains.
Completely hacked off
Thousands of fiber optic cables, Bendele notes, “were completely hacked off.” There’s only one way to get the internet back for frantic customers. “Each of those tiny cords needed to be spliced back together.” The sabotage took one operative seconds but the repair dragged on.
“Crews on-site started working on fixing the cables around 5:00 a.m. Wednesday morning.” When Bendele filled in reporters with what he knew, “they were hoping to get service back up and running by 3:00 p.m.”
The sabotage done by a single person required a whole crew. “Even with 12 people on hand, the meticulous work took them four hours more than he estimated.”
(COLORADO SPRINGS) – A widespread power outage affecting hundreds of thousands of people, from Chipita Park to Fountain, was due to an overnight act of vandalism, according to Comcast workers. https://t.co/ts3j31zim8
— NATOA (@NATOA) January 13, 2023
They’re used to outages but this is much different. “We deal with fiber outages a lot, but vandalism like this?”
Thanks to an act of sabotage which nobody saw coming, “over 150,000 people were without service on Wednesday.” That’s an intolerable situation for those who rely heavily on the exchange of data across the internet. Which means just about everyone. “In this day and age, many businesses, homes, offices, and even schools, were unable to operate without internet.”
As Cindy Jensen, owner of the body shop explains, “it did shut us down, essentially. We have no phones. We have no Internet. We can’t write estimates. We can’t process payments. We really can’t service our customers.” Students in the Manitou Springs School District had the day off to play in the snow because of it. “It shows how reliant we are on internet,” Jensen adds. Police are clueless and not bothering to look real hard for the domestic terrorist. “The Colorado Springs Police Department said they are investigating the incident but called it a ‘low priority call.‘“
