BY MAIRE O’NEILL
maire@losalamosreporter.com
If Los Alamos County residents stayed up until 11 p.m. Tuesday, they could have listened in to an update given to Los Alamos County Council on recent outages of cell service and internet in the community and what is expected to happen at the NM-4 Route 4 Water Pipe/Cable Project.
Following public comment at the start of meeting at 6 p.m., Council Chair Theresa Cull pointed out that on the agenda for Tuesday’s meeting there was an item under the Council Chair’s report where Council would receive a report on the March 17 utility outage.
“It’s late in the agenda, but it’s there,” Chair Cull said, however the Chair’s Report was not actually on the agenda and there was no mention of the report that was eventually given by James Alarid, DPU’s Deputy Utility Manager for the Engineering Division.
Alarid said people are asking how close the project is to being finished.
“We’re 67 percent complete right now. It looks like we have another 3,700 feet that we have to trench adjacent to this fiber optic line. We found out that the damage that took place on March 11 was the fault of the contractor and on March 17 it was the fault of the utility, which was Lumen,” he said.
Since March 17, DPU has approached Lumen and demanded some more support on the project.
“They did email us and say they would but we haven’t seen any additional effort out there. We wanted to have a full-time person. We thought it was in everybody’s best interest to throw a little extra effort. The communication with the location contractor has improved and our contractor has made the adjustment to slow down and they have lost a lot of confidence in the locates from Lumen,” Alarid said. “They are finding that the fiber optic and the locate wire are not close enough to trust. State law says you have to be within 18 inches of your mark otherwise it’s the utility’s fault if it gets damaged, so we’re beyond that in a lot of areas.”
He said the engineering plans didn’t have the fiber optic line identified in most of the alignment where it turned out to be and DPU followed up with their engineers.
“Their due diligence is to call in all the design locates and utilities have to come out there and paint the ground. It wasn’t done for most of this alignment. Lumen painted some of the ground but it did not identify the majority of it so we are going to get into a discussion. We were put on notice by the contractor that it is some ‘unforeseen conditions’, so we’ll see what kind of a justification they put forward and we’ll be having some negotiations on that,” Alarid said. “We were able to re-engineer one piece. It turns out that there was an archaeological site identified by LANL that we could excavate. In this area of the project we have a smaller pipe than the existing that’s there, so we were able to resolve that conflict by sleeving a new pipe inside the existing and as we dealt with the contractor and worked this out, we’re going to do it in a lot more areas that have archaeological so we saved trenching about 1,700 feet adjacent to the fiber optic by just opening up pits and just pushing the pipe through the existing.”
He said for both parties – the County and the contractor – that was a great option to reduce the risk in the operation.
“Right now, the way the work is progressing, we’ll probably see the project totally completed by June. We’ll probably be testing water lines in the next two weeks and putting the first segment in service. You will see work continue into White Rock. We’ll probably approach Rover Boulevard by the end of the week. We’ll probably get into some work within the asphalt and the shoulder within White Rock from Rover. Our ultimate tie-in point is in the corner of the fire station parking lot. It doesn’t go far into White Rock, so we’ll see about a week of activity within town,” Alarid said.
County Manager Anne Laurent noted a couple of things that have come to her by being brought up in conversation.
“One is just reiterating that where we are digging is largely outside the County on Pueblo land, and we’re working within a restricted area. We are replacing our water line. I’ve heard comments like we should put in our own line. We don’t have the proper easement so we’re not allowed to put in our own fiber line, but that $2 million is part of the grant and the Pueblo de San Ildefonso has partnered with DPU and the contractor and they are laying in the conduit that’s part of that grant money as part of this project. And when they pull their own fiber and get that lit up, and that will be a redundant line down that corridor,” she said.
Chair Theresa Cull asked if the contractor would have to trench again in order to put in the fiber line that the County just allocated $2 million for. Alarid responded that in this area they are going to leave the conduits in the pole boxes so that they will be just pulling within the conduits – no excavations. Chair Cull said she was, “just having a nightmare there for a moment”.
Councilor Randall Ryti asked if “unforeseen conditions” was a term from the contract and if there was going to be more funding needed to complete the job. Alarid said the context of the “unforeseen conditions” is the contractor is putting the County on notice that they have been damaged with the additional potholing and the loss of production time because of delays to doing so.
“I imagine there’s going to be a monetary request here soon. Our construction contract is very clear on what’s justifiable and what isn’t so we’ll just have to really critique what’s in front of us and make sure it’s a fair request or if there are things that don’t qualify. We’ll work with them on that,” Alarid said.
Councilor Ryn Herrmann noted that the outages have really impacted the small business community and asked Alarid if there was any chance that Lumen would entertain reimbursement for any of that.
“We have been contacted by many businesses and we have referred them to Lumen and the contractor because ultimately it would be one of those two parties that would compensate and they would have to follow up with them. We don’t know what’s going on beyond that. Lumen doesn’t share any of that information,” Alarid responded.
Chair Cull said she was told the Laboratory did not lose internet during the last outage and asked Alarid if that was true. Alarid responded that that was what he was hearing. Chair Cull said she was curious why they did not.
“Did they have a back-up system?,” she asked. Alarid said he believed the Lab has a back-up but he was not sure.
Councilor Melanee Hand said she read about LANL’s back-up system in the newspaper and asked if that was something the County was considering.
https://www.lanl.gov/media/news/0319-microwave-technology
County Manager Laurent said in terms of the entire community, no. It is private.
“Broadband is something where you purchase the service and so some people can buy Starlink or some other services as a redundancy on their own. The County itself has a microwave tower. We should have redundancy with that microwave but we ran into a firewall issue that wasn’t resolved, so we’re in the process of fixing that so that our systems would have been up and running,” she said. “What happened is any of us (County staff) who were trying to work were only able to work through the public wi-fi and then that got overloaded so it will only go so far. So, yes, there was some connectivity through wireless. My understanding is their back-up is a wireless system. The reason our cell phones are down is the wire up to that cell tower took down the cell tower, but if you drove out further towards PCS and towards the Valley, you could pick up a signal from another tower.”
Apparently LANL has a microwave tower just like the County have a microwave tower that were both purchased over the last couple of years due to former outages. Under pubic comment, Andrea Determan of Los Alamos Public Schools said her husband who works at the Lab told her the Lab only had internet within the company in their buildings and did not have outside service.
“I would like to know how many more outages we will have to deal with until it’s completed, because for the schools, we can’t easily get compensated and do all the paperwork that we’ll need to get some compensation, so we’d like to know what’s coming and what can we do, because you know our schools deal with this on a regular basis, Determan said.