San Jose and San Carlos police, along with the FBI, received dozens of tips throughout the weekend relating to the severed fiber optic cables in both cities that knocked out a wide array of telecommunication services in southern Santa Clara County last week. However, officers have not contacted any suspects or made any arrests, according to police in both departments.
“We received 18 tips over the weekend and are in the process of weeding through them, some of which are solid and some of which are not,” San Jose Police Sgt. Ronnie Lopez said. “We definitely have leads, but we’re determining how valid or sound they actually are.”
AT&T is still offering a $250,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of anyone involved in the vandalism, but the company also did not hear of any major developments, Spokesman John Britton said.
“I know the police have been working on several leads, but I’m not aware of anything new,” Britton said.
Up in San Carlos, detectives are still looking into potential footage from red light cameras near the vandalism sites, but it will be another week at least before they know if video exists. Sgt. Mark Robbins report said his department was also combing through a handful of tips, but in terms of tips that warranted immediate action, there was “nothing at this point.”
A spokesperson for the FBI referred questions to the local authorities.
San Jose and San Carlos police both reported that they had not identified any cuts besides those made Thursday morning, when an unknown number of suspects cut a total of 10 underground fiber optic cables in both cities between 1:30 and 3:30 a.m., causing Internet access and 911 service to drop throughout southern Santa Clara County, along with ATMs, cell phone texting, cable TV and land line service.
Police still suspect multiple vandals were behind the sabotage. Six lines were cut at two spots near the intersection of Blossom Hill Road and Monterey Highway in south San Jose about 1:30 a.m. Thursday. Four additional lines in two separate locations a few hundred yards apart on Old County Road in San Carlos were severed at 3:30 a.m. Thursday. It was the cuts in San Jose that primarily caused the massive cell phone, land line and Internet outage in the South Valley that left residents without communication and left businesses operating on a cash-only basis. The severed cables in San Carlos contributed to the service interruption, AT&T Spokesman John Britton said.
In San Carlos, the saboteur or saboteurs pried off manholes in the middle of the street and climbed into the wet underground pathways to snip essential AT&T lines, Cmdr. Richard Cinfio said.
“It was clean cut straight through,” Cinfio said of the truncated cable he saw dangling underground – something that definitely required more than scissors but probably nothing elaborate or motorized, he said. Removing the city’s standard street manhole simply required a crowbar and some muscle to pry off, Cinfio said, but Britton said removing the heavy seal takes a more a specialized tool.
Lopez of the San Jose Police Department said authorities are confident the incidents are connected. The very least of the charges the potential vandal or vandals could face are felony vandalism, he added, though more charges could pile up if police find the lack of phone service, particularly 911, resulted in death, injury or widespread theft. Saint Louise Regional Hospital representative Jasmine Nguyen did not return messages Friday, and Santa Clara County District Attorney Spokesperson Amy Cornell nodded to the likely vandalism charge but otherwise declined to speculate.
All told, 52,214 Verizon landline customers lost service in southern Santa Clara County, according to Jon Davies, a spokesman with Verizon, which is the sole provider of land lines in southern Santa Clara County. Customers of Verizon Wireless and Sprint wireless – which also rely on the lines AT&T owns to convey calls on their networks – also could not make calls until the evening. T-Mobile and AboveNet customers were also affected, as were Verizon Wireless users in southern Santa Clara County and users from Watsonville to Scotts Valley in Santa Cruz County.
AT&T first discovered four broken lines when phone and Internet service to tens of thousands of residents in southern Santa Clara County began to drop. It wasn’t until about 8:30 a.m. that police and AT&T staff realized the San Carlos lines had been cut and it was not until 4 p.m. that AT&T found that two more fiber optic lines had been cut in San Jose, a few hundred yards from the initial location, Britton said. Britton estimated more than 100,000 people were affected in the resulting service interruptions.
“I can’t understand the motivation why someone did this,” Britton said, noting that it was not for financial gain as no property such as expensive copper wire was stolen from the vandalism scenes. “What I do know is the person who did this has no idea of the widespread implications. Thousands of people were inconvenienced out of a deliberate criminal act, and we have zero tolerance.”
City Administrator Tom Haglund said Friday he had not heard any reports from staff about city projects, bids or grant submittals falling victim to the telecommunication blackout, which generally lifted about 8 p.m. That’s about when police met at the Emergency Operations Center across City Hall at Sixth and Rosanna streets and conferred with the 15 to 20 city emergency managers, HAM radio volunteers, California Highway Patrol officers, Santa Clara Sheriff’s Office deputies, Cal Fire firefighters and Red Cross officials, all of whom decided to put the center in standby mode until it was shut down 12 hours later.
As the night began, residents running errands and eating at restaurants also reported a general return to normality. That included 911 service, which came back online about the same time. Dispatchers spent most of Thursday answering phones through the department’s business line, but they could not see time-saving caller ID information that normally comes through on 911 calls. The return to full operation relieved the doubled shift of officers patrolling the streets during the pre-dawn hours.
“Everything went fine – nothing big happened,” Sgt. John Sheedy said.
Phones at The Dispatch were still acting up Friday, but lines at City Hall and businesses around town seemed to work fine.
All the lines that were cut varied in thickness but the biggest one was about as thick in diameter as a 50-cent piece and had a heavy plastic sheath wrapped around it, Britton said. Britton declined to talk about any specific and additional security measures AT&T may be considering to make such crimes less likely in the future, but he said the company will continue to work with federal and state agencies as it has in the past whenever security flags have popped up – or not, as in this case.
“Wires stretch across America, and you can’t put a cop on every cable,” Britton said.
Within each of the chopped lines runs a bundle of glass fiber strands, each one about as thick as a human hair. The smallest bundle contained 48 fibers, and the largest one that was cut Thursday contained 360 such fibers. Each hair-sized fiber can carry about 300 to 400 telephone calls, Britton said. But phone calls take up less space than other information the glass strands carry, such as ATM transactions, data, videos and other files passing through the Internet.
As to why the snipping of a subterranean cable would disrupt wireless cell phone networks, Britton explained that cell tower sites transmit a lot of the information they receive to central offices through high-speed land lines. If a cell phone user is attempting to contact another cell phone, for example, the central office would then transmit the call to another cell site, where the call would proceed through the air until it reaches the targeted phone.
The lines that were cut Thursday are the kind that, within the vast network of telecommunications transmission vehicles, end up carrying about 80 percent of local cell phone traffic, Britton said. To restore service, repair crews had to splice each of the fiber optic strands by hand – hence the all-day operation.
As far as potential suspects, Britton said AT&T does not believe that the Communication Workers of America labor union – which had a contract with the company that expired about a week ago – was involved in the sabotage.
