After flooding and gas leaks, SC town has ‘heartburn’ over request for fiber optic cables
Plans to lay a new fiber optic cable line in one Irmo neighborhood is causing “heartburn” for town officials.
Irmo Town Council gave provisional approval Tuesday to a request from Spectrum Southeast to dig in Veterans Park to bury new fiber optic internet cables serving the Bickley Station neighborhood.
“Any time I hear about an easement with somebody digging in the ground, I get heartburn, I get agita and I get headaches,” Mayor Bill Danielson said about the request. “That’s before we even approve it.”
The mayor isn’t the only one who has an acute reaction to new underground cables. Because there’s a finite area underground that can comfortably hold a host of utilities, work in recent years to install fiber optic cables has resulted in everything from flooding and broken water mains to gas leaks that have caused residents to evacuate their homes.
“I want to know what we can do,” Danielson asked city staff. “What is our park going to look like when these people are done digging it up? What is the road going to look like when people are driving home on Palmetto Wood Parkway over steel plates for six months?”
Gas leaks, floods and urinating in bushes
Last year, the city of Columbia halted work by the internet service provider Lumos after its crews caused half a dozen gas leaks, including one that required several residents of the Elmwood Park neighborhood to be temporarily evacuated from their homes and the closure of busy Elmwood Avenue.
In March, the town of Lexington halted work by Ripple Fiber over complaints that workers with the company had torn up residents’ yards without repairing them, knocked out one man’s phone line for a week and urinated in people’s bushes.
Irmo Town Administrator Courtney Dennis said the planned Spectrum easement will be 12 feet from the sidewalk, further than usual for the town to try to keep work separate from existing utilities.
“They’re a little bit less likely to hit them,” Dennis said. “It will come close to our irrigation system, but that’s easier to fix than a gas line.”
“This is probably a larger issue with right-of-ways,” he added. “They weren’t meant to be crammed with 15 different utilities.”
Irmo will not be able to require a bond from the contractor burying the lines, the town council was told. But town attorney Jake Moore said Irmo can add provisions to its approval that the contractor must return the area to its original condition and that any utility damage must be repaired in an “expedited fashion.”
Town council approved the request “subject to modifications,” which council members will review at a workshop on Sept. 3 and vote on at the next council meeting on Sept. 17. But the mayor still seemed leery of the public reaction to utility work in a town park.
“You know we’re going to get bombarded with emails,” Danielson said.
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