It doesn’t matter how much we protect, maintain and improve our network, accidents still happen. Here are some examples – and how we try to prevent them.
Third-party damage
Every year, other companies damage our cables and lines. We work hard to avoid this happening to our network by training staff from other companies, providing plans and locating cables for them. But damage still occurs. The costs are considerable but, wherever possible, we bill those responsible.
Insulation failure
Most of our cables run underground in urban areas. Once a cable has been buried, we can’t do any maintenance work on it. So predicting when its insulation might fail becomes rather like predicting when a light bulb will blow: almost impossible. When failure happens, replacement is the only option. If a cable section fails twice in two years, we’ll replace it anyway.
Unknown causes
Sometimes it’s impossible to tell what caused an outage because there are no signs of damage. When this happens, we can usually restore power without any repairs.