Deep Communication Gte Crews Use Barge To Lay Fiber Optic Cable On The Bottom Of Lake Coeur D’Alene

John Lind, a GTE engineer, sweated under his hard hat as he strained his bulk against a nylon line pulling a two-mile long fiber optic cable.

“That’s one of the benefits of eating hay and oats for breakfast,” he joked, while he and other GTE workers pulled the line through a conduit under the Third Street dock parking area Thursday.

On the other end was a giant reel of cable sitting on a lake barge, waiting to lay the fiber optic line across the bottom of Lake Coeur d’Alene to Kidd Island Bay.

The job was part of a larger project to improve service between Coeur d’Alene and Moscow, and provide fiber optic technology to the Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s bingo hall and the University of Idaho, said Bob Wayt, GTE spokesman.

Lind has been waking up in a cold sweat at night, fearing that the cable might come up short before the barge reached land, said a colleague.

“It’s pretty important that he (the tugboat captain) navigate it properly, or we’ll come up short,” said Jane Bright, GTE’s construction coordinator.

Lind looked confident Thursday, however.

Barge owner Skip Murphy owns a Geographic Positioning System, technology that navigates with the help of satellites. “The computer keeps them on course, so it’s foolproof,” Lind said.

At 1:30 p.m., the $1 million project was a little behind schedule because of a few unexpected snags, admitted Wayt.

One “little” snag was the 10,000-pound reel of cable.

Murphy wasn’t comfortable using his equipment to lift the cable reel because it was so heavy, Bright explained. So GTE brought in a heavy truck to do the job.

When workers for contractor Henkels and McCoy first tried to turn one of the reels of steel cable, which are used to weight down the fiber optic cable, the reel wouldn’t turn. Then the cable needed to be passed through the conduit by hand.

After all those problems were overcome, the barge began to move across the lake. Workers attached concrete blocks to the cables to weight them down in the lake.

GTE expected the lake portion of the job to be finished by the end of Thursday and the whole project to be done by the end of October.

Then, GTE will have state-of-the-art cable in service from Sandpoint to Moscow, which will increase the capacity for long-distance traffic, improve reliability of telephone service in that area, and make it possible to provide high-capacity services - such as the transmission of video.

Fiber optics are hair-thin strands of glass that transmit information at the speed of light. The cable laid across Coeur d’Alene Thursday has 32 strands.

Customer rates will not increase because of the project, according to GTE.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo