TIMES-RECORD (Brunswick, Maine) 14 August 07 Men and snakes 'battle' for energy (Bob Kalish)
Arrowsic: For Alexander Bridge, the troubles began in May. "It seemed like we'd lose phone service for six to 10 hours, at least once a week," he said.
Bridge lives on Bald Head Road, in a spacious house he works out of as an entrepreneur.
The intermittent phone service drove him crazy. Finally evading computerized answering systems, he reached a human being at Verizon.
"I ended up talking to someone in Massachusetts, who didn't know anything about Arrowsic, Maine, or Bald Head Road," he said.
Perseverance paid off, however, and he was told someone from his area would call him back. Within the hour, Sean Sullivan called. Sullivan is the local manager for Verizon. He covers the area from Bowdoinham to Boothbay and even before he talked to Bridge, he was familiar with the problems visited upon the residents of Bald Head Road.
"I was down there recently for the umpteenth time and was telling one of the techs that before all this started in the spring, I hardly knew this switching cabinet existed," said Sullivan.
The cabinet is just off Route 127 before the intersection of Bald Head Road, in a clearing carved out of the woods. Apparently its location is some kind of recreation area for snakes, for they are the culprits..
Yes, the residents of Bald Head Road are plagued by snakes on the phone. But according to Greg Alley, a splice service technician for Verizon, snakes are just one of the life forms plaguing phone lines and switches.
"We've had some problems this spring and summer with that particular site," Alley said. "The thing is, you never know what you're going to get when you open up the box."
If not snakes, there are other worries technicians can obsess over, such as mice, squirrels, ants and yes, wasps.
Sullivan said it's tough when you're 30 feet up on a pole, strapped in, and you open up the box only to discover you've broken a nest of wasps.
"You're strapped up there, your face two feet from the swarm of angry wasps, and there's nothing you can do," he said.
Lowly ants are high on the list, also.
"Ants will build a nest, using the insulation from the wires," Sullivan said. "They leave a real mess."
Snakes, on the other hand, are just looking for a warm place to curl up. Telephone switching cabinets, which carry about 40 volts of electricity (not enough to fry critters), make warm sense if you're a snake.
It's not so much the snake, Sullivan and Alley agree, but what they do when they're inside the cabinet that causes the problems. In other words, to be as polite as possible, it's the bodily functions of the snake that causes the switches to short out. Short of installing tiny (but lengthy) port-a-potties in the cabinet, Sullivan said he is working on blocking any possible avenue of entrance, the idea being to prevent the snake from getting inside.
"But snakes can get through the tiniest gap," he said.
Sullivan takes the problem seriously.
"We don't like having to come down here and shoo the snakes away," he said. "We'd much prefer they stay out in the first place."
On a recent trip to the cabinet, Sullivan found a common two-foot garden snake in the corner, curled up and in no particular hurry to move. But move he did, slithering into the morass of wires like it was his place and Sullivan was the intruder. The Verizon people use a pretty low-tech means of snake ejection, a stick with some grounding wire in the shape of a hook on the end. But this time the snake crawled too deep into the labyrinth of modern communication for Sullivan to reach.
"I'll get him eventually," Sullivan said. When he does reach him, the snake will be put back in the woods and the game between snake and the people of Bald Head Road resumes.
Men and snakes 'battle' for energy