The vessel Ms. Diane, owned and operated by Jeff Johnson, conducted surveying Oct. 20 on Turnagain Arm for the future deployment of a fiber optics cable along the coastline. The project is expected to begin next spring when the ice melts.
|
The vessel Ms. Diane, owned and operated by Jeff Johnson, conducted surveying Oct. 20 on Turnagain Arm for the future deployment of a fiber optics cable along the coastline. The project is expected to begin next spring when the ice melts. |
By Ken Smith
Turnagain Times
Last month there were reports of a rare sighting in Turnagain Arm—a large vessel traveling down the inlet. The ship was observed anchoring near the mouth of 20 mile river on Oct. 20. The next day the mysterious ship was gone.
It turns out that this was no ghost ship, it was, in fact, a surveying vessel mapping a route for a GCI ground breaking project to lay a fiber optics cable along the coast.
Like Captain Cook before him, Jeff Johnson captained the Ms. Diane through the infamously dangerous Turnagain Arm and its extreme tides and menacing mudflats.
“What we’re doing is laying a fiber cable from the Potter Marsh Railroad Museum to the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center,” said GCI vice president and spokesman David Morris.
There is already a fiber optics cable that runs along the railroad corridor, but the new cable being laid will provide a secondary carrier route.
“What we’re doing is creating a diverse path,” he said. “If any communications goes down, you’re off the air. This cable will allow for a back-up and switching capability. The new fiber optics will work in tandem with the cable along the railroad corridor. You don’t want to put all your traffic on one. We’re going to separate the traffic into the different cables.”
Morris explained that the cables in the railroad corridor are close together and one catastrophic event could knock out communications to Whittier, which would then shut down service to Valdez and Seward. GCI’s fiber optics cables are critical infrastructure supporting telephone, internet and cellular services to these communities.
It’s been a long time since a large ship navigated Turnagain Arm, but Morris said he believes fishing vessels did go down the inlet in the early 60s prior to the ’64 Earthquake, but after the earthquake, the Arm became less navigable.
Now that a course has been mapped, Morris said the company is ready to begin laying the cable in late spring after the ice melts. GCI was ready to begin the project in October, but the early arrival of ice thwarted those plans.
GCI has been quiet about the project, Morris said, until engineers were sure of the start date.
“We had the surveyor out mapping the route, but by all accounts winter came early this year,” he said. “So we’ll have to start laying the cable in the spring. We’ll start in Portage by the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center.”
From that point he said the existing cable along the railroad corridor can be accessed in the area.
The technology being applied to lay the fiber optics cable will be a first by a telecommunications company in Alaska. First water jets will clear a channel, the cable will then be laid in the channel, and after a couple of tide changes, the cable should be buried.
The project itself will require several large vessels 60 to 70 feet in length and smaller craft to shuttle crew members back and forth from shore. The $2.5 million project is expected to be completed in three days with 40 miles of cable being laid.
Morris said the impact to the environment should be minimal. An extensive permitting process was conducted with six permits finally being approved by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one that was issued through the Army Corps of Engineers.
“The cables are pretty benign,” Morris said. “Once they’re buried, there’s no impact. There’s no types of hazardous material.”
The project comes on the heels of the Oct. 17 listing of Cook Inlet beluga whales as an endangered species. NOAA’s Fishery Service is in charge overseeing and approving all activities and projects that may impact Cook Inlet belugas.
There is a side note to this project. If successful, it could lead to a more ambitious plan by GCI to lay fiber optics cables to interior communities that rely exclusively on satellite carriers, which suffer from delays and much slower data speed than is provided by fiber optics—the more advanced technology to transmit long distance communications.
“What we’re looking at doing is using this as a test bed for burying cable in shallow waterbeds,” Morris said. “Because one of the things on our horizon from the technology perspective is to lay fiber optics cables throughout rural Alaska using the interior river system.”