OSO — With the fusing of two fine, flexible strands, permanent landlines between Arlington and Darrington have been restored, nearly a year after the deadly mudslide here severed connections.
The new lines replace a temporary system that has been in place since two days after the March 22 disaster.
On Tuesday, Arlington Mayor Barbara Tolbert and Darrington Mayor Dan Rankin completed the link. They lined up thin fiber optic cables in a black box, then pressed a button that brought the machine to life. Tolbert’s strand stemmed from a blue Arlington cable, Rankin’s from a yellow Darrington line. The machine spliced them, sealing the wires together.
“That’s a perfect splice,” said Andrea Stinardo, a Frontier Communications splicer who guided the mayors through the process.
Frontier crews finished attaching lines to new utility poles last week. Tolbert and Rankin called the project a milestone in the ongoing recovery of their communities.
Last year’s mudslide killed 43 people and isolated Darrington by burying a stretch of Highway 530, toppling utility poles and snapping wires. It wiped out the town’s landlines for phone, Internet and 911 calls. The Sauk-Suiattle Reservation also was cut off.
“Our 911 depends on this cable being up and operating, so you can imagine how important this is,” Tolbert said.
For nearly a year, temporary lines were run through ravines and tethered to trees, Frontier general manager Ken Baldwin said. In the days after the mudslide, quickly reconnecting Darrington to the rest of the world was more important than the placement of the wires, he said. There weren’t any poles left in the slide area.
“What happened when the mudslide went through is it just snapped the lines in half,” Baldwin said. “We had crews go from both ends pulling wires through the blackberry bushes and in the ravines. The fastest possible way was to pull it out and tie it to a tree or tie it to a blackberry bush or put a stake in the ground and tie them there.”
Workers were barred from the area on day 2, the Sunday after the slide, but they were in with their equipment on day 3. Teams used the Seattle City Light access road to lay the temporary lines. It was wet and treacherous, Baldwin said. It took about five hours for 15 people to lay lines while others worked from either end — some in Darrington and some in Oso — to get the severed system back up. They installed 14,000 feet of fiber optic cable.
Darrington and the Sauk-Suiattle Reservation, cut off for more than two days, got service back the night of March 24. Oso and Lake Cavanaugh lost it temporarily the day of the slide, but came back online hours later.
Frontier crews also took an inventory of lines heading west from Oso toward Stanwood, Baldwin said. After the mudslide, officials worried the Stillaguamish River would flood, pushing destruction downstream. Workers sandbagged around the office in Stanwood just in case.
Frontier employees came to a community meeting 48 hours after the slide, Rankin recalled. They announced that phone and internet service had been restored.
“The whole crowd roared,” he said.
Before the new temporary lines were placed, Frontier set up satellite and Internet service for the pharmacy and clinic in Darrington. Workers established public access point for wireless Internet at the Darrington Community Center, North County Family Services, Oso Fire Station and Oso Community Chapel. They also provided Internet and internal communication systems for the Darrington Fire Station, the U.S. Forest Service’s Darrington Ranger District and the Sauk-Suiattle Tribal Center.
The company did not charge for those services, Baldwin said.
Frontier is the only land-based phone service in the area, Baldwin said. Wireless providers also stepped in after the mudslide to set up communication centers, including one at the Darrington fairgrounds.
“There were no lines that said this is AT&T or Verizon or Frontier,” Baldwin said. “Communications were needed up there, and everybody pitched in to make it happen.”
Kari Bray: 425-339-3439, kbray@heraldnet.com
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