Wilson Bridge construction produces more than just traffic tie-ups, as Porto Vecchio residents learned last week. While digging up portions of Washington Street near the high-rise luxury condominium on Aug. 25, contractors on the Wilson Bridge Project sliced through both a Dominion Virginia Power line and a Verizon Telephone line.
Power was restored within three hours but some telephone service was out for two days.
"They told me they cut what they thought was an abandoned cable," said James R. Nitschke, Porto Vecchio general manager. "First the power went out at about 8 a.m. and then the telephones went dead around 10 a.m."
Only the south tower of Porto Vecchio lost power. "But the phones were gone in the entire complex," said Nitchske. The bridge project had to contact both utilities to have them restore their individual services. Porto Vecchio is home to approximately 300 residents in 170 units plus the management office, according to Nitschke.
"It affected 171 customers overall. It went down at 7:56 that morning and we had it back up by 12:50 p.m.," said Le Ha Anderson, a spokeswoman for Dominion Virginia Power.
Telephone service was a whole other matter. "When service is lost in a given area it does not come back all at once. It usually comes back customer by customer," said Paul Miller, a spokesman for Verizon.
"The Porto Vecchio cable was a 2,700 pair cable which is very labor intensive to repair. It took us 48 hours to get some of the customers back into service," Miller said. "In Northern Virginia we use our own people to make the repairs. It is not contracted out."
There was plenty of line to repair, too, he said, since the contractor cut 10 feet of the Verizon line, thinking that it was an inactive cable. "But they should not be cutting our cable — active or inactive," Miller said. Many times cable is left in the ground even though service is inactive. "This is done so that if service is restored to a particular area the cable is already there," he said.
IN ANY EXCAVATION, residential or construction site, Virginia law mandates a call to "Miss Utility," the state's control organization for all excavation and demolition. Miss Utility, in turn, asks utilities to mark lines buried in the excavation area.
This was the case for the power lines at Porto Vecchio. "Miss Utility calls our contractor, Utiliquest, directly and they mark the lines and give a ticket to the customer which gives the specifics for the dig. It also contains a time frame in which the dig can be done," Anderson stated.
"There is a record of everything and the contractor takes full responsibility. It is a very controlled process," Anderson emphasized.
"We recognize that there was an unplanned interruption of utilities. But, unfortunately, because of the nature of construction, these things are going to occasionally happen," said Michele Holland, public affairs manager for the Woodrow Wilson Bridge Project.
"We are currently investigating the incident to better understand exactly what happened and to minimize future occurrences," she said.