Phone cable failure requires construction on Locust Walk

Students walking along Locust Walk in the past few days have been dodging not only puddles but construction work as well.

Penn's Information Systems and Computing division is currently repairing the ductbank that covers the telephone cable at the intersection of Locust Walk and 36th Street, causing a portion of the Walk to be blocked off with fencing.

"We are finishing up a project that replaces an old concrete ductbank with a new one, because the old one collapsed," Infrastructure Projects and Planning Technical Director Chuck Echelmeier said.

The collapse of the ductbank is only one of the problems at the intersection. The telephone cable that runs underneath the Walk failed as well.

While the cable can usually be replaced without removing the street's pavement, this particular situation did not allow for the standard procedure to be followed.

"Because the ductbank itself collapsed, we could not pull the cable out," Echelmeier said.

The cable failure deprived some buildings on the Walk of their phone lines on Thursday before a temporary line was put into place.

"One of the offices was left without a phone line," Annenberg School for Communication Building Manager Deborah Porter said. "The problem was called in on Thursday, and it took an hour or two on Friday to fix it."

ISC officials said the work on Locust is scheduled to reach completion by the end of this week, when the new cable will be activated.

"ISC, through the Facilities department, does this work in a relatively short period of time, given the time in the school year," Echelmeier said.

This replacement is also an occasion to upgrade the area's telephone service, as well as to eliminate the temporary cable that was installed when the main one failed, Echelmeier said.

The work represents the first phase of a larger project that will renovate other telephone cables on Locust Walk, from 36th to 37th streets.

The entire project is financed by ISC. The repairs currently under way bear a price tag of about $50,000, while the cost for the entire project will approach $300,000.

While this first round of repairs had to be performed immediately, the rest of the revamp project will pick up at the end of the semester, in order to reduce interference with students' activities.

Nonetheless, many students said the repairs currently going on are not as unobtrusive as ISC officials would like.

"It's a little annoying, because there are tons of people cramming in a smaller space," College senior Sarah Koplik said. "Locust Walk is the most direct route to my classes, but I have many of them in Williams Hall, so taking Spruce Street is not a big deal."

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