19 Mar Record-Breakingly Cold Winter Puts Your Cable At Risk
The winter that ruined everything
In Winnipeg, frigid temperatures and heaping snowbanks are all part of the local charm. When your city’s nickname is “Winterpeg”-a label so famous it appears in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary-complaining about the cold is a waste of warm air. It’s bloody freezing. Everyone knows it. Bundle up and carry
If you’re from Canada, particularly the prairies where Norscan is located, you needn’t an article to inform you of just how long and cold this winter has been — looking out your office window at the snowbanks still standing tall should tell you all you need to know. But this winter has been more than just record-breakingly cold, here in Winnipeg it’s wreaked havoc on our buried utilities, leaving nearly 1,000 homes without water.
This begs the question of what it means for your own buried assets. Whether it’s damage to your cable sheath, or wet and frozen splices, your outside plant is at risk in these extremely cold climates. When water freezes inside your splice enclosure, it creates pressure that can crush your fiber and put strain on your splices, leaving you with a weakened signal or worse, a system outage.
Without a Cable Monitoring system in place, you’re left out in the cold without ever knowing that this damage is occurring (until it’s too late). Our Cable Monitoringsystems can keep you in the know on the integrity of your buriedcable, allowing you to address the minor issue before it turns intocostly system outage.
The extreme cold also greatly increases the amount of infrastructure repair work, such as broken water mains, frozen water and sewer lines, and road repair. This increased activity exposes your cable to additional risk, especially when the frost extends so deep into the ground.
More than ever, it is important to respond to locates quickly and accurately to minimize your risk and to accelerate the repair process. Our Touchless Locates system can double your locates per day while also increasing the accuracy of your locates.
Contact us to learn more!