Telecom cables get cut in 48% of all utility strikes despite being fragile

Telecommunications infrastructure — fiber optic cables, coaxial lines, copper pairs — accounts for 48% of all reported underground utility damage incidents, despite being a fraction of total buried infrastructure by volume. This happens because telecom cables are buried shallower than other utilities (often 12-24 inches vs. 30-48 inches for gas and water), are physically fragile (a single backhoe scrape severs fiber), and are the hardest utilities to locate because they have no metallic signature for electromagnetic locators unless a tracer wire was co-installed (and tracer wires corrode and break within 10-15 years). When a fiber trunk line is cut, the consequences cascade: a single cut can take out internet, phone, and 911 service for tens of thousands of people. Repair takes 4-12 hours because a fiber splice technician must be dispatched, each of the 48-288 individual fibers must be fusion-spliced, and the splice must be tested. The median direct repair cost is $600 million industry-wide per year, with $18 billion in indirect costs from business disruption. The structural reason telecom gets hit disproportionately: telecom was the last utility type to go underground (1980s-2000s), so it was installed in whatever right-of-way space remained, often in irregular alignments that don't match any standard utility corridor. Records are particularly poor because the telecom industry went through decades of mergers, acquisitions, and bankruptcies, and many cable records were lost in transitions between owners.