At 11am one Saturday one of our MDs received a call from UBB Essex, a waste handling and recycling plant covering an area of approximately 6 acres as rats had damaged the fibre optic cabling which was essential for the plant to keep running. Without the communications and data input transmitted via it wasn’t possible to monitor the machinery and therefore it was necessary to shut down. Naturally any shut down at a site so large is going to be a serious and costly, so the period of inactivity had to be as brief as possible and the repairs reliable and permanent.

Our engineers attended the site between the hours of 10pm and 4am repairing the fibre optic cabling, with full testing on all the connections and termination points.

Unlike metal cable and wiring, fibre optic cabling needs specialist expertise and equipment to ensure that all the data being transmitted is being accurately and reliable received. Secure, uninterrupted data is vital, especially in the case of industrial plants where the health and safety of staff, visitors and the general public at large could be affected by any failure of safeguarding.

It was estimated that there would be anything up to 120,000 rats living in a waste treatment plant that size. The waste is left to maturate for several weeks during the treatment process and during this time it is a cornucopia of delights for vermin. Once on site the problem is that the animals are inclined to find safe, secure, undisturbed spots to make their homes and then gnaw on things. Unfortunately the things they like to sharpen their teeth on includes electrical and fibre optic cabling, and it was this gnawing which had caused the problems UBB Essex faced, resulting in their call to call us. This isn’t the first time we’ve had to deal with damage caused by having been asked to solve similar problems in other locations using fibre optic communications we were able to not only make the repairs necessary, carry out all testing but also ensure that it was unlikely for wildlife to interrupt the smooth running of the facility again.

Briant Communications don’t usually work weekends, especially not at such unsocial hours, but in such a special case we were happy to do what we could in order to resolve the problem and get them back operating safely and efficiently once again.

Briant Communications
3 Stanford Square
Worthing
West Sussex
BN11 3EZ
01273 465377

enquiries@briantcomms.com