This is an interesting article. Puts a lump in my little heart when i think about how hard people are working to make our company successful.
(DocStone, i'd say "Bye, best wishes," but i think you're pretty smart so i'll just say "See ya soon." )
Anyway, this story will be published in Forbes Magazine on December 13, 1999:
The digital revolution promised us bits, not atoms--but somebody has to move some very gritty atoms to make the bits possible.
True Grit
By Carleen Hawn
NEXT TIME YOU E-MAIL KAZAKHSTAN or play cyberchess with a Finn, pause to thank people like Harold Warren, better known to his colleagues as the Slasher. Warren, 44, is a 6-foot, sunburnt, blond-haired seaman from Scotland. When we caught up with him he was standing on a beach in Belgium pouring gasoline onto a dirty rag, struggling to clean tar off his hands.
Warren is a cable rigger. He travels the seas, threading the ocean floor with fiber-optic cable, and then, getting down into the trenches, lands the cable on remote beaches. These cables are bundles of glass strands that can carry trillions of bits of information per second and thereby make possible a globe-girdling Internet that is delivered to your door for only $25 a month.
You don't want this job. Riggers can get badly injured. Warren, a former British Royal Marine, earned his nickname on a job in India in 1998. A co-worker mangled his hand under a shipping container. Warren sewed it back together before the paramedics arrived. Riggers mark their time by the number of nights spent in each fleabag hotel, the petty cash spent in each dive bar. These roustabouts of the photonic age are not particularly well paid. Warren is an independent contractor pulling down some $250 a day, from which gross sum he has to cover his own disability insurance, though few buy it. (Health care is free in the United Kingdom.)
"It's okay work if you can get it," Warren says smugly, lighting up a cigarette. "More interesting than sitting in an office behind a desk."
In Belgium, Warren and 40 other men were charged with linking the shore end of a 7,000-mile fiber-optic network. This particular segment will stretch 70 miles across the English Channel, from Bredene, Belgium to Dumpton Gap, Kent, near Dover. The network will link 25 cities in eight European countries and be able to carry 9.6 trillion bits per second, hypothetically enough for 124 million voice calls. That happens to be more circuits than there are phone lines on the continent today, says Michael Ruddy of Pioneer Consulting, a telecommunications market research firm. But Internet customers want more than voice connections; they want streaming video and audio, at data rates up to 30 times the rate of a voice call.
The Belgian connection is part of an $850 million project called the Pan European Crossing (PEC), which is being installed by Global Marine Systems Ltd., a subsidiary of Bermuda-based Global Crossing that specializes in undersea cable installation.
Global Marine's roots go back to 1851, the year the first undersea telegraph cable was strung between Dover and Calais, France.
Confined to the ship for weeks, talk turns to drink and women.
The fraternity of submarine cable riggers like Warren is small, around 500 worldwide. With the need for bandwidth surging across the globe, they cannot work fast enough. Pioneer Consulting estimates that 450,000 miles of submarine fiber-optic cable will be laid by 2005, double the amount the industry has laid since it first installed fiber optic in 1986. Last year Global Marine's dozen cable landings kept the men away from home for more than eight months.
There is nary a continent on which Warren and his colleagues have not worked.
"Pakistan, Norway and Nigeria were the worst," recalls George (Geordie) Harrison, 56, an installation superintendent. In Pakistan the men had to land a cable under armed guard. "In Sicily we were accosted by thugs with sawed-off shotguns," adds Andrew Shaw, 27. "They were mad that we were on 'their beach.' Then they found out that one of our local contractors was higher up in 'the organization' than they were. The next day their cars were burned out."
It's 9 p.m. the night before the crew will begin the connection on the Belgian end. The workers have just made their way across the Channel, having completed the Dover connection behind schedule. When a cable is laid in the ocean, the riggers drop a line the width of a garden hose and watch it sink quietly beneath the surface. The shore work is much trickier. All 40 men--including riggers on the cable ship, the scuba divers who monitor it underwater and operators of an underwater
trench-digging machine--will come into contact with the line. The complicated steps in a shore job are squeezed into 72 hours.
"Logistically, they're a nightmare," says Roger Langton, 49, the PEC project manager.
"The work isn't very glamorous. It's 90% boredom and 10% fear."
At dawn a crew of ordnance specialists is on the beach, trying to keep warm on a gray and dreary windy day. The men, wearing reflective jumpsuits and hardhats, use metal detectors to scan the sand for problems--like unexploded munitions dating back to World War I. Bad news this day. The team is huddling around a waterlogged pit with shovels and pails, trying to extract a 33-pound clump of thickly corroded shrapnel. At the top of the beach, near a manhole, Justin Blake, 32, uses a surveyor's level to map out the path that the cable will take, from the manhole on land to a deepwater connection point 6 miles out to sea.
A mile out to sea, aboard the Salvage Chief, Martin Peters, 28, and Chris Druid, 24, are on the bridge, talking via walkie-talkie to Blake and logging his readings onto their navigational charts. The crew of the Salvage Chief, a former Dutch salvage barge, are running through a set of rehearsal drills to prepare for tomorrow, when they will beach their 700-ton fully loaded vessel on the spot that the ordnance detectors are now clearing.
Half the men on board are the ship's regular crew. The rest are specialized cable riggers like Warren. Many are brawny ex-commando types, and proud to say so. There are more than a handful of tattoos and earrings. Confined to the ship for weeks on end, the men display signs of stress and boredom. When conversation does not concern work (or drink), it invariably turns to women. Project manager Langton's polite phrase for the sailors: "They're the salt of the earth."
Ordnance men scan the sand for munitions dating back to World War I.
Cable jobs pay a little better than ordinary merchant marine work. Most on board, depending on their experience and position, get about $180 a day, but deck managers like Gary Cooper, 62, may earn as much as $320. Only the scuba divers get time-and-a-half pay for overtime. "The biggest problem we have," explains Shaw, the young rigger who was in Sicily, "is finding the skilled men for the work. Most of them are getting up there in age." Like Harrison or Cooper, who are both close to retirement. "I've got seven grandchildren," Cooper brags. The long time away is enough to drive even the young ones out.
Shaw himself, whose wife gave birth to their first child, a daughter, in November, plans to trade shore-end work for a desk job with Global Marine soon.
It is after dark by the time the last of the anchor drills is finished. Suddenly a 20-foot geyser of salt water spews from a leak in
the hydraulic pump that will power the underwater plow tomorrow. It has to be fixed by 5:00 a.m., the hour their work begins on the beach at Bredene. The crew will be up all night.
By 9 a.m. the next day the Salvage Chief has been run aground onto the beach, resting parallel to the coastline. A group of riggers, like a team in a tug-of-war, are pulling on 3 tons of armored submarine cable. As a general rule, you don't need armoring in the deep sea, but you do need it on land and for the first 6 miles out to sea to protect the cable from fishing trawlers, shipping tankers and sharks.
Alongside the ship, divers are helping the deck crew unload a remote-operated underwater plow. Others are on deck, tying bright pink floats to the cable.
At noon backhoes begin to cut a 233-yard-long, 6-foot-deep trench across the beach. The machines have to finish their work before the tide comes back in. The diggers finish in two hours and the cable is buried with its end tucked into the manhole.
Now the Salvage Chief, pulled by two 95-ton tugs, inches out to sea at about a tenth of a mile per hour, uncoiling the cable as it moves. The cable, meanwhile, has been threaded through the plow. The plow, with divers alongside to keep it steady, buries the cable in the seabed.
Many of the divers cut their teeth on oil rig construction sites in the North Sea. Although the pay isn't great, about $20 an hour, most have switched to cable work because they get a lot of paid downtime when they can drink and have a good time. Jonathan Gardiner, 37, dive supervisor: "The work isn't glamorous. It's 90% boredom and 10% fear."
Six miles out, the Salvage Chief drops the line to the sea floor and marks it by a float on the surface. Some time later the cable will be picked up by a deepwater cable ship, which will then splice the line to a reel of cable in its hold. It will pay out cable until it reaches the floating marker for the Dumpton Gap shore end line, thus completing the undersea cable lay. |
