Bomb Squad Nearly Blows Up Shetland Telecom’s Fibre Network

Part of Shetland Telecom‘s fibre optic broadband network on the remote Shetland Islands (Scotland) was only slightly, albeit knowingly, damaged last Friday following the discovering of a WWII era pipe bomb, which had to be made safe through detonation by a professional bomb squad.

The cable itself is the product of the joint SHEFA-2 Interconnect Project, which nearly a decade ago saw the Shetland Islands Council (SIC) establish Shetland Telecom as part of a scheme to connect a local “full fibre” network to the undersea (subsea) SHEFA-2 fibre cable that linked the Faroe Islands with mainland Scotland.

Fast forward to last week and a team from Scottish Water were busy installing a new water main at Scatsta when they discovered the old World War II era pipe bomb. “The bomb was sitting about 50cms under our main (only) fibre link to Sellaness,” said Shetland Telecom on their Facebook page.

Now this is the sort of discovery that can sometimes result in the understandable soiling of an engineer’s trousers, although luckily no such outcome was reported. Instead the ISP had to contact all of their customers in order to make them aware of the situation and that the bomb would be detonated the following day.

A Spokesperson for Shetland Telecom said:

“We amassed a crew ready to repair the fibre as fast as possible after the explosion. So when the time came we had a small army of our own ready and primed. None of us could believe that after the explosion our network monitoring system was showing no problems. Once we got the all clear to do the inspection we discovered that the only damage was a tiny scratch to duct wall.

So we are now in a position to say that Shetland Telecom network is officially “bomb proof“.”

A somewhat grainy video of the incident can be found online, although we’re pleased that nobody was hurt and the network survived with only minor damage. A significant amount of credit for that must also go to the bomb squad for setting up the blast in such a way as to divert most of its energy away from the vulnerable fibre.

All’s well that ends well, but this is still a useful reminder of the dangers that engineers can sometimes face when doing their daily jobs.