The long goodbye

When Hurricane Sandy battered the eastern seaboard of the United States in 2012, a storm surge caused catastrophic flooding of Verizon’s central office (CO) in Broad Street, Manhattan. Miles of underground copper cables were ruined by the water. Even worse, paper insulation in the wiring sucked water deeper into the network through capillary action, destroying cables in otherwise dry areas. Verizon found that it was too difficult, expensive and time-consuming to rescue the existing copper network, so decided to rewire with optical fibre cables instead.