GCI breaks new ground to hook up damaged cable on Turnagain Arm
Ken Smith/Turnagain Times
A boat in Turnagain Arm waits across from McHugh Creek to connect a damaged GCI fiber optic line.
Ken Smith/Turnagain Times
Bob Harr is the co-owner of Meridian Construction. He and his crew were working to drill a hole under the Seward Highway to pass a fiber optic line through a conduit from Turnagain Arm to McHugh Creek. The company utilizes horizontal directional drilling, a trenchless technology also used to construct culverts.
By Ken Smith
Turnagain Times
When GCI laid down a new fiber optic line in Turnagain Arm three years ago, the elements they were dealing with – undulating mud and floating ice– was an unknown challenge. The company utilized natural channels in the inlet to run the back-up cable to Portage, which then goes down to Seward and eventually the Lower 48.
However, one section of the Arm between Potter Marsh and McHugh Creek had no natural channels to run the line down, leaving it vulnerable to floating ice and moving mud form the infamous bore tide.
During the early spring of this year, something happened to the fiber optic line, and it was damaged.
Late last month, GCI was able to get a boat out onto the Arm to search for the damaged cable. Once they found it, the plan was to utilize horizontal, directional drilling, avoiding open excavation along the Seward Highway.
The plan was to bore underneath the highway from the inlet to McHugh Creek.
“We’re still working on it, and expect it to be completed in the next couple of weeks,” said Gary Haynes, vice president of operations outside plant for GCI. “The cable that was in the water broke; we’re not sure exactly how, but we think it was floating ice. It was late spring and by the time we got out to it, it was too late. They found one end of it, and the other end was a little harder to find, but they went and fished it out.”
The fiber optic lines – both the back-up and primary cables – originate at GCI’s south Anchorage distribution center. The two lines then follow separate paths, one down the inlet, and the other along Power Line Pass.
“It’s (inlet cable) buried all the way in the mud and goes to Portage and connects a cable to Seward,” said Haynes. “It’s a back-up line that duplicates the main fiber optic line that follows Powerline Pass that goes all the way to Whittier.”
When the boat recovered the cable in the inlet, a piece was then spliced onto it. The cable will run over to McHugh Creek through a conduit under the Seward Highway.
Meridian Construction in Anchorage, a company that specializes in horizontal directional drilling, was hired by GCI to build a conduit underneath the highway from the inlet to McHugh Creek.
Ross Thompson is the administration manager for Meridian. He was onsite at McHugh Creek as they dealt with a problem – drilling through unconsolidated soil.
“We weren’t sure what we had to drill through,” he said. “There’s solid rock, boulders, sand, mud. It’s diverse. We would rather have solid rock because you can control steering of your drill heads.”
Bob Harr, 54, is co-owner of Meridian Construction and behind some of the patents for the trenchless drilling technology.
His company is usually involved with installing culverts. He’s strongly pushing for the Department of Transportation to utilize trenchless drilling to avoid tearing up the highway and delaying traffic. But the work he was doing for GCI at McHugh Creek was taking him into new terrain.
“We had to feel our way under the ground to determine the make-up of the soils,” he said. “It was different all the time.”
Harr was inventing new drill heads on the fly at the worksite to adapt to the changing soil conditions.
It took several painstaking tries and extra days, but they finally drilled a straight line from the inlet to McHugh Creek.
Enter problem number three: pulling a rope through the pipe that will attach to the fiber optic line to then be drawn through the conduit. Several times the rope broke, adding more days and costs.
Trenchless technology gave way to a backhoe for the last few feet to find the end of the rope. Some of the pavement had to be dug up in the parking lot, but eventually the end of the rope was apprehended. The fiber optic line was eventually attached to the rope, pulled through the conduit, and spliced into the cable returning to the south Anchorage distribution center.
There’s still some work ahead to complete the connection, but the most difficult part of the job is over.
“We’ll splice it here and then we’ll be done,” said Thompson.
A GCI crew will repair the torn up section of the parking lot next spring.
