Fibre Duct Protection?

!3 years ago, the Welsh Government ran a fibre line from Manchester to Bangor to offer high speed connectivity to various business parks. https://www.sell2wales.gov.wales/search/show/search_... (I believe it later caused some problems in trying to get Openreach to come into the same area, but that is another matter.)

It came through our village, Hawarden, and it is easy to locate the duct from the filled in trench.

Today our village hall had a new water connection and Welsh Water's contractors soon exposed the duct (no damage). What was interesting was a thin wire laid along the top of the duct.
http://www.ancient-mariner.co.uk/public/IMG_1596.JPG and
http://www.ancient-mariner.co.uk/public/IMG_1606.JPG

Assuming that this "wire" or is it fibre? was not supposed to have been inside the duct Could it be an alarm wire, so that if it is broken it sends an alarm signal back to "base"? I imagine that if broken and down to earth, it could also be used to locate the damage?

Cheers!

It’s a marker wire that ensures the duct and fibre can be picked up by a cat & genny (underground services detector) and hopefully not dug up by accident in the future.

Wish they ran them over more plastic based services. Would’ve helped enormously when I put the digger through our MDPE water main a few years ago when trenching in a new three phase supply.

UKPN engineers working in the trench about 30 yards away, weren’t best pleased when the exposed pot they were splicing service too, suddenly had a trench filling up with water. I’ve never seen two guys work as fast to fill the pot back.

We all laughed after. Except for when the damages bill duly arrived in the post some months later from Anglian Water. Doh!

I thought that was why water was at 900mm and electricity at 600mm to stop that happening?

Private road, water main laid on one side, power on the other. Water crosses road to be on same side as power. Road is built with reinforced concrete, but precise depth and location of where the branch crossed was hard to tell. Smallest nick the bucket tooth was all it needed. Tears! 😂

Nice to see it done properly.

A lot of the fibre builds nowadays are shockingly poor quality. With Virgin's Lightning build particularly shoddy.

A lot of the fibre builds nowadays are shockingly poor quality. With Virgin's Lightning build particularly shoddy.

Maybe the clue is in the name