Summary
Mitsuyoshi Hirai was the chief engineer of the cable maintenance ship Ocean Link. The ship was 20 miles off Japan’s eastern coast. The repair was now nearly done. All that remained was to rebury the cable on the seafloor. Mitsuyoshi Hirai was the former chief engineer of the Ocean Link. He knew tsunamis become dangerous when all the water displaced by the quake reaches shallow water and slows and grows taller. The Ocean Link, floating in less than 500 feet of water, was too shallow for comfort. The Ocean Link was one of a small number of ships that maintain the subsea cables that carry 99 percent of the world’s data. Members of the crew who weren’t working gathered on the bridge to watch the news. They took turns trying to reach loved ones using the ship’Satellite phone, but no calls went through. The world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’S oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems. If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function. A map of the world shows the dozens of fibre optic cable systems which stretch across the oceans, connecting continents and island chains. The map animates to show the cables laid down between 1989 and the present, with planned cables up to 2027 also displayed. Few people set out to join the profession, mostly because few people know it exists. Hirai’s career path is characteristic in its circuitousness. Others come to the field from merchant navies, marine construction, marine engineering, geology, optics, or other tangentially related disciplines. KCS has around 80 employees, many of whom, like Hirai, have worked there for decades. Because the industry is small and careers long, it can seem like everyone knows one another. People often refer to it as a family. There are 77 cable ships in the world, according to data supplied by SubTel Forum. Only 22 are designated for repair, and it’s an aging and eclectic fleet. Often, maintenance is their second act. The cables hadn’t fallen victim to some catastrophic event. It was just the usual entropy of fishing, shipping, and technical failure. But perhaps a greater threat to the industry’s long-term survival is that the people, like the ships, are getting old. “One of the biggest problems we have in this industry is attracting new people to it,” said Constable. A career in subsea means enduring long stretches far from home, unpredictable schedules, and poor internet. The Ocean Link spent two nights at sea before receiving orders to return. As they neared land, Hirai saw debris from the tsunami’s backwash floating in the water. A 50-foot tsunami wave overtopped a seawall protecting the Fukushima power plant. The disaster had severed phone lines and wrecked cell towers. Seven of Japan’s 12 transpacific cables were severed. In 2006, an earthquake dislodged sediment on Taiwan’s southern coast and sent it rushing 160 miles into the Luzon Strait. If another cable failed, it would have lost all traffic to the US. With servers for most major internet companies located there, Japan would have effectively lost the internet. Eleven ships, including the Ocean Link, nearly two months to finish repairs. The majority of the faults were located offshore of the ongoing nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. Cyrus Field is known to history as the person responsible for running a telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean. But he also conducted what at the time was considered an equally great technical feat: the first deep-sea cable repair. Cables shorted out, snapped under tension, snagged on rocks, were sliced by anchors, twisted by currents, and attacked by swordfish. Cable repair today works more or less the same as in Field’s day. A ship would drag a hooked grapnel anchor across the seafloor. Increasing tension showed they’d caught the cable, which they would then haul on board to fix. The first submarine cable, strung across the English Channel in 1850, survived for a single day. The deepest repair the Ocean Link conducted in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake was 6,200 meters. Fishing accounts for about 40 percent of faults, according to the International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC) Bottom trawling, particularly as it extends into new regions and deeper water in pursuit of depleting fish stocks, is especially damaging. An old YouTube video of a shark biting a cable went viral in 2014, it incited global news coverage. The ICPC issued a statement saying that it didn’t even look like a data cable. Yet the myth endures, possibly because there is something satisfying about the idea of the modern world being brought down by the appetites of a prehistoric creature. A broken cable is fixed by patching the break with a piece of new cable, but because the break is miles away on the ocean floor, this must be done in several steps. The ship is now holding a working cable but one that is considerably longer than it used to be. The Ocean Link had already added the slack required to bring it to the surface, no cutting required. The ocean floor was more than three miles down, and it took the grapnel more than six hours to hit bottom. After 19 hours of winding, the grapnel came over the bow and was illuminated by the deck lights. Hirai was horrified at what he saw. They had caught the cable, but it was mangled unlike anything he had seen before. If the cable snapped, the grapnel would fly across the deck, killing anyone it hit. The landslides created by the earthquake must have been far greater than he had imagined. When the telcos started laying coaxial cables in the 1950s, they decided to pool resources. The zone system continued, now governed by contracts between cable owners and ship operators. Tech companies that previously purchased bandwidth from telcos began pouring billions of dollars into cable systems of their own. The result has been not just a boom in new cables but a change in the topology of the internet. The European Union, India, and other governments have proposed investing in maintenance vessels directly. The situation of SubCom illustrates the industry’s strange moment. The company has been withdrawing from maintenance work, according to industry sources. The submarine cable world has never been particularly public. The industry has begun to recognize that this poses a recruiting challenge. The result is a code of silence that pervades the entire business. It took the Ocean Link a month to complete its first repair. Many of the remaining faults lay 50 miles off the coast of Chiba, deep in the Japan Trench. It was a cable chokepoint, and a landslide must have crashed down and wrecked them all. Takashi Kurokawa is a Japanese expert in the art of 'jointing' The process of splicing fiber can take 20 hours, with Kurokawi and his team working in shifts. Each joint is expected to function untouched under crushing pressure for at least 25 years. Hirai had mapped out the plan to a meticulous 23 steps. On June 26th, they tested the apparatus. It worked. They set sail the same day, with no estimate for how long it would take. In 2008, the Ocean Link was called to recover a branching unit that another cable ship accidentally dropped into the Japan Trench while trying to deploy it. They had to complete two final splices — one for each leg — then deposit the whole apparatus to the ocean floor intact. Mitsuyoshi Hirai, Kurokawa, Kobayashi, and more than a dozen members of the crew assembled on the foredeck. The white-painted prow glared bright in the sun as the branching unit was brought out. The Ocean Link returned to the site where they had made their rushed escape. The repair was so close to port that there was no time to celebrate. The earthquake had caused more than 20 faults, and the Ocean Link had repaired 11 of them.
