NoaNet Breaks Ground In Valley

WAITSBURG - The creation of a digital super highway through the Touchet Valley made some big strides this winter and the conduit for its fiber optics cable may be completed as soon as early spring.

Crews have been trenching and boring their way from Walla Walla to Waitsburg through Dixie since the beginning of the year. This week, they are mobilizing to start in Dayton and head in the opposite direction to connect the route to Waitsburg, then on to Clarkston.

If all goes well, the 1,600- mile fiber optic trunk line the Tacoma-based Northwest Open Access Network (NoaNet) is building across the state will be ready for local branching and connections this summer, according chief engineer Brad Langdell.

"Most of the work in town is done," Langdell said about Waitsburg.

Compared by some to the arrival of electricity to homes in the Touchet Valley after President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, the NoaNet digital superhighway is expected to bring high-speed broadband to rural communities throughout the state.

The line, paid for by federal stimulus money, is expected to boost cyber speeds for users like the local library, the hospital and other users so they can drastically cut download times and increase project sharing, which can be life-saving in the case of medical procedures.

The installation of the conduit, a 1.25-inch, orangecolored tube that houses the sensitive fiber optic strands and bundles streaming digital data in both directions, has had its challenges, Langdell said.

The exact locations are kept confidential to avoid unauthorized digging or looting of sites that are considered "protected places," said Frederick Anderson, an archeologist with HRA.

State and local agencies at every level have been cooperative with the wiring project, but getting all the right permits from government right-of-way owners takes time.

NoaNet has had to deal with a dozen different entities in this area - from the cities of Dayton and Waitsburg, the two counties, the state Department of Transportation and so on. Just to string the conduit across the Snake River bridge took the approval of five agencies, including the Department of Natural Resources, the U.S. Coast Guard, Department of Transportation and the U.S. Corps of Engineers.

Crews dig or bore down at least 4 feet and sometimes up to 10 feet below the surface to place the conduit, Landell said. To avoid any conflict with a future road project near Touchet, the crew put the line at a double-digit depth.

The operation bypassed areas that were still too muddy and will come back to those when drier weather returns. Crews use machines known as Ditch Witches, horizontal directional drills that can trench several hundred feet under sidewalks and roads at an angle to avoid the much more time-consuming, disruptive and labor-intensive cutting and trenching.

Following Highway 12, crews install white-and-orange colored posts every 1,000 feet and concrete access vaults where the lines are spliced, extended and serviced. The half-inch fiber optic cable gets pushed through the conduit and the slack is taken up in the vaults.

Each cable has four tubes with 12 fiber optic strands each for a total of 48 strands. The optical fibers are flexible strands of pure glass (silica) no wider than a human hair and can transmit signals over longer distances and at higher bandwidths than other forms of communication.

Fibers are used instead of metal wires because signals travel along them with less loss and are also immune to electromagnetic interference.

Each fiber can carry many independent channels, each using a different wave length of light. Larger cables can carry the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of phone calls and hundreds of television channels .

Going east from Dayton, where the conduit will be installed largely overhead, NoaNet will veer off Highway 12 at Turner Road and make a straight line to Pomeroy through Marengo, rather than follow the large bends in the highway, Langdell said.

The NoaNet fiber optics infrastructure is expected to be in place by the end of 2012 or early 2013.