Spate of Cable Repairs in UK Waters

From the middle of February to the middle of March, there was a spate of outages in UK territorial or Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) waters on six submarine fiber optic cables (see Figure 1 below).:

Figure 1 - Cable Repairs in UK Waters 2/15/2017 to 3/15/2017

Source: Kingfisher, MarineTraffic.com, Julian Rawle Consulting

Nokia Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) mobilized three vessels under its APMA private maintenance contract: the "Île de Brehat", the "Île d'Aix", and the "Peter Faber". Global Marine (GMSL) mobilized the "Wave Sentinel" under its contract with the Atlantic Cable Maintenance Agreement (ACMA).

The French ships carried out repairs to Hibernia Atlantic, Atlantic Crossing-1, Celtic (Ireland-UK), and FLAG Atlantic-1 in the Western Atlantic approaches to Cornwall, UK and in the Irish Sea, while the GMSL vessel took care of faults on Europe-Asia cable, SEA-ME-WE-3, and on the transatlantic cable, TAT-14.

Source : Kingfisher, MarineTraffic.com, Julian Rawle Consulting

ANALYSIS: Highlighted in Figure 1 above are three incidents which occurred within the space of five days and all in more or less the same location. This data would tend to suggest a common cause for these three outages e.g. a trawler fishing. The other outages appear to be independent.

While the "Île de Brehat" and the "Peter Faber" had fairly straightforward missions which took ten and eight days respectively to complete, the "Wave Sentinel" and "Île d'Aix" each completed repairs to more than one cable.

"Wave Sentinel" left Brest, France on 2/15 and steamed to the North Sea where she commenced work on SEA-ME-WE-3 on 2/18. On 2/23, she ceased operations, presumably for bad weather, and anchored off Rotterdam. On 2/24, she returned to the repair site but ceased operations again on 3/1, returning to a Rotterdam anchorage. On 3/2, she returned to the repair site but, on 3/4, she moved to a new position at 51.34365 N, 2.5735 E until 3/11. At this point, TAT-14 also developed a fault. The "Wave Sentinel" returned to Brest on 3/13 to load TAT-14 cable and departed again on 3/14. The TAT-14 repair, also in the North Sea was completed on 3/20 at which time the "Wave Sentinel" returned to the repair site for SEA-ME-WE-3, completing the work on 3/24 (see Figure 2 below).

The "Ile d'Aix" left Calais, France on 2/27 and worked on the repair to the Hibernia Atlantic cable until 3/5. She then returned to Calais on 3/7, leaving again on 3/9 and resuming work on Hibernia Atlantic until 3/20. The same day, she started work on repairing the Celtic (Ireland-UK) cable and completed 3/28 (see Figure 3 below).

A search of the online Media has turned up no mention of these cable repairs or any disruption to end users. This is a testament to the resiliency of UK's international network, transatlantic, intra-Europe, and domestic.

Figure 2 - Itinerary of Wave Sentinel during SEA-ME-WE-3 & TAT-14 Repairs

Source: Kingfisher, MarineTraffic.com, Julian Rawle Consulting

Figure 3 - Itinerary of Île d'Aix during Hibernia Atlantic & Celtic Repairs

Source: Kingfisher, MarineTraffic.com, Julian Rawle Consulting