Fibre optic cable stuck

The contractor on the Queenstown Lakes District Council Bendemeer pipeline project at Lake Hayes struck a telecom fibre optic cable today, Queenstown Lakes District Council general manager engineering Mark Kunath said.

“On this particular job the contractor was wary that a fibre optic cable was in the vicinity and has worked closely with Telecom to ensure the cable remained intact,” Mr Kunath said.

Telecom had been on-site and marked the route of the cable and two Telecom ‘spotters’ were on-site at the time the cable was struck.

“The location where the cable was struck was not in the vicinity of the marked route,’ he said.

The council regretted the incident and was disappointed so many people had been inconvenienced, with an estimated 5000 households in Arrowtown, Gibbston and Wanaka left without internet or phone services, just before 3pm today.

“From our perspective we are more than satisfied that our contractor has taken every possible precaution to avoid such an occurrence and obviously we will be keen to ensure that this situation is not repeated in the future,” Mr Kunath said.

He understood that Telecom hoped to have remedied the outage by 6.30pm, this evening.