←back to thread

577 points mooreds | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
staplung ◴[] No.42176496[source]
It's worth mentioning that cable breakages happen quite often; globally about 200 times per year [1] and the article itself mentions that just last year, two other cables and a gas pipeline were taken out by an anchor. The Gulf of Finland is evidently quite shallow. From what I understand, cable repair ships are likely to use ROVs for parts of repair jobs but only when the water is shallow so hopefully they can figure out whether the damage looks like sabotage before they sever the cable to repair it. Of course, if you're a bad actor and want plausible deniability, maybe you'd make it look like anchor damage or, deliberately drag an anchor right over the cables.

Cable repairs are certainly annoying and for the operator of the cable, expensive. However, they are usually repaired relatively quickly. I'd be more worried if many more cables were severed at the same time. If you're only going to break one or two a year, you might as well not bother.

1: https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea...

replies(11): >>42177868 #>>42178949 #>>42179789 #>>42181124 #>>42181825 #>>42182141 #>>42182166 #>>42182377 #>>42183002 #>>42184314 #>>42187800 #
belter ◴[] No.42182377[source]
"Germany’s defense minister says damage to 2 Baltic data cables appears to be sabotage" - https://apnews.com/article/germany-finland-baltic-data-cable...
replies(3): >>42183619 #>>42185086 #>>42186558 #
1. madaxe_again ◴[] No.42186558[source]
I suppose in today’s world it’s hard to know what was sabotage and what was an accident, and where the buck stops - particularly in marine matters. Was that anchor drag intentional? Did the operator know their charts were out of date? Did that trawl net really fail and snag like that?

We’ll go around in circles until it’s irrelevant.