The phone rang at 7pm on a Monday. We need to mobilize now! Three floors of the hospital network were down. I didn’t know it at the time, but the cable pulling team had destroyed a pre-existing 12-strand single-mode fiber optic cable. This team had been installing a new 12-wire shielded fiber. One of the boys in the middle of the race had no ladder. The guy seemed to be pulling the armored cable off the ground. There was a bundle of about 20 armored fiber cables coming from a hole in the wall above the ceiling. It turned out that the new fiber being pulled was resting on the larger fiber bundle. While pulling from its location on the ground, it pulled the new cable down into the active pack. In fact, it was burning the outer layers of the existing cables. All the cables could have done it except the one in the center of the package which was not shielded. The new shielded cable went through it very easily.
This situation disrupted 3 floors of an area within a New York City hospital. We were summoned for an emergency repair. We were able to quickly fix it that night. A couple of days later we made a permanent solution. When we started troubleshooting, we had no idea where the problem was. We knew there was a group laying cables in the data center the night before. We fire a laser beam onto the fiber from one of the fiber heads inside the data center. Once we looked around, we saw some light inside the ceiling. As we got closer, the opening through the wall where the largest pile of fiber had been passing was basically lit red like a Christmas tree. We had pointed out the problem to this place. We were able to remove a certain amount of slack and when we pulled it off the wall the laser was coming out of the cut fiber!
The moral of this experience is to use proper equipment in addition to common sense, please! The basic laws of physics will confirm this, you should not pull on a wire that is rubbing against another wire or perhaps a bunch of wires for an extended period of time without catastrophes. This was costly to fix and created an embarrassing situation for the contractor. Think before you shoot!
