Openreach Engineer Swaps Full Fibre for Wood Chopping Competition

Speaking as somebody who just spent Saturday chopping down a dangerous tree, I can attest that it’s not an easy task. So spare a thought for Openreach engineer Justine Narusa, whose skills at pulling heavy core fibre optic broadband cables through ducts have been converted to a place at today’s Royal Wood Chopping Competition.

Justine is normally more at home working as a cabler in Caernarfon, Wales. But just 10 weeks ago that changed after her Openreach manager, Andrew Evans, saw (no pun intended) the potential in Justine as a “lumberjill“. Andrew is no stranger to this world, as he himself has represented and captained Great Britain in Timbersport in competitions around the World for more than 12 years.

“Being a fibre cabler can be physically hard work as the cable which carries our fibre needs to be robust so is rather heavy. I was really impressed with how Justine made light work of pulling the cable through our ducts and immediately thought that she had some potential in Timbersport,” said Andrew.

After a lot of training, Justine recently entered into the first ever Female Timbersport Championship in Malvern (Worcestershire), where she promptly came 2nd, only four points behind the winner. She will today follow that up by taking part at the Royal Welsh Wood Chopping Competition in Builth Wells, where she will “battle it out using axes and two metre crosscut saws in timed races” against some of Europe’s top female competitors.

Justine said:

“I’m really looking forward to competing in front of a packed Royal Welsh crowd. The standard will be extremely high, but I’ve trained hard with the support of Andrew, so fingers crossed I can win gold. Timbersport provides incredible opportunites to travel the world and pit yourself against the very best in wood chopping. Who knows, if I wasn’t working for Openreach and not have Andrew as a colleague I may never have experienced these opportunities.”

Just to be clear, they aren’t fighting each other to the death in this competition, just chopping and cutting wood. But you really do have to be a true gladiator to even think about doing anything like this in today’s heat. Best of luck to Justine! Hopefully she won’t be giving up the day job, though, as there’s already a shortage of good fibre engineers. We mean fibre optic, not wood fibre.

I could have used Justine’s skills on Saturday, although admittedly chopping down the tree was a piece of cake with our cordless pole saw – it’s the clearing up afterwards that kills you. We did check and the Royal Welsh Wood Chopping Competition does not, currently, appear to have a category where you spend x hours meticulously removing small branches from a downed tree and stacking them into a 10-foot-high pile, often conducted while simultaneously cursing the sky for your chosen plight.