Snow, ice cut BPA cables

The Daily Inter Lake

Snow and ice are believed to be the cause of two Bonneville Power Administration fiber-optic cable breaks in Western Montana Wednesday.

One break occurred in the Silver Butte area, at high elevation, south of U.S. 2 and southeast of Libby, according to Doug Johnson, a spokesman at BPA headquarters in Portland, Ore.

"What we found was that the fiber between two towers had been completely severed because of ice and snow," Johnson said. Crews were immediately dispatched to the break, which occurred at about 5 p.m., and additional help was sent from Spokane.

Another fiber line break was detected along the Montana-Idaho border north of Lookout Pass on Interstate 90 at about the same time.

"We have a crew out trying to locate the problem there," Johnson said Thursday afternoon. "We have not identified the problem yet. If a tower were down, we would have a power outage. We expect to find a severed fiber line like the other one."

The Silver Butte fiber line provides Internet connectivity to customers in Northwest Montana, while the line north of Lookout Pass is used exclusively for BPA operations.

"Our focus is getting that line fixed that other customers rely on," Johnson said.

Johnson could not speculate how many people or Internet service providers were impacted, because some providers can turn to redundant fiber networks. There were reports that Internet customers in the Eureka area had lost service entirely since the Silver Butte line was severed.