Suspected Sabotage Causes Massive Phone Outage

Santa Clara County officials have declared a local emergency after they said someone intentionally cut an underground fiber optic cable in south San Jose, causing a widespread phone service outage in southern Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties today that included disruption to 911 emergency phone service.

John Britton, a spokesman for AT&T, said it appears somebody opened a manhole in South San Jose, climbed down eight to 10 feet and cut four or five fiber-optic cables.Britton also said there was a report of underground cables being cut in San Carlos.

AT&T is offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever is responsible for the sabotage, Britton said.

The outage initially affected some cell phones, Internet access and about 52,200 Verizon household land lines in Morgan Hill, Gilroy and Santa Cruz County, according to the Santa Clara County Office of Emergency Services. The cell phone networks affected are Verizon, Nextel, Sprint and some AT&T.

Verizon is the sole provider of land lines in the South County area.

“We’ve never to this extent in recent history had this kind of phone outage,” said Gilroy police Sgt. Jim Gillio.

ATMs in South Santa Clara County were not working.

Saint Louise Regional Hospital in Gilroy cancelled all elective surgeries in response to the emergency, according to county officials.

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Canada Pipeline Bombed A Second Time

UPDATE 10/17/08 A gas pipeline in northern British Columbia was bombed for a second time in a week, the police said Thursday. Neither the explosion last Saturday nor the second bombing, which occurred late Wednesday or early Thursday, significantly damaged the pipeline, which carries sour gas, natural gas that contains toxic hydrogen sulfide.

An antiterrorism unit of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is investigating the bombings. EnCana, the energy company that owns the pipeline, said the second blast created a small leak and forced a shutdown of the pipeline. Last week, news organizations in the region received anonymous letters demanding that oil and gas projects in the area be shut down.

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Former CSIS strategist David Harris says a weekend explosion near the town of Dawson Creek in northeastern B.C. fits the description of terrorism, despite police statements to the contrary.

Sometime overnight Saturday, someone detonated a large explosion next to the sour gas pipeline about 50 kilometres from the B.C.-Alberta border.

The blast did not rupture the pipeline but blew a 1.8-metre crater in the ground, which was discovered by a hunter on Sunday.

“How on earth anyone could declare this was not terrorism at this early stage is beyond me. Terrorism is associated with an attempt by threat or actual violence … to change policy,” said Harris, former chief of strategic planning for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and now a private security expert.

The previous week, suspicious handwritten letters arrived at newspapers and a TV station in Dawson Creek calling EnCana Corp. and other energy companies “terrorists” for expanding “deadly” gas wells and giving the firms a deadline to shut down operations, including the gas plant served by the pipeline.

“You have until Oct. 11, 2008 (Saturday, 12 noon) to close down your operations … and leave the area until further notice,” the letters said.

“We will not negotiate with terrorists, which you are, as you keep on endangering our families with crazy expansion of deadly gas wells in our homelands,” the letters said.

RCMP spokesman Sgt. Tim Shields called the blast a serious criminal matter but stopped short of calling the explosion terrorism.

“It was set there … with the intent to blow up that pipeline. That’s a threat to the infrastructure of this province,” said Shields. “We’re not categorizing this as terrorism.”

“We just don’t want to start using the word terrorism at this point. It gives credence and maybe satisfaction to the people who are involved in setting this explosive off,” he said.

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