Network access provider Openreach (BT) has issued another update on a long-running underground petrol leak in the Surrey village of Bramley, which has already restricted the ability to safely work on their local broadband ISP and phone network. The bad news today is that “making [this] network safe and accessible” could now take “at least 12 months“.
In case anybody missed our last report in early June 2024 (here). Openreach is currently dealing with the “significant and ongoing impact” of the incident, which technically began 2 year ago after fuel started leaking from the local ASDA Petrol Station. But over the course of that time this leak has begun to cause fuel smells in the area, harming local businesses, and has also spread into the groundwater (i.e. no drinking of tap water in certain areas) and even local utility services.
At least 300 metres of their underground cable ducts in the area have been affected and cleaning it up will involve specialist equipment, processes and lots of detailed coordination amongst the affected organisations and relevant authorities. For example, they’ve already begun to work alongside Thames Water and others to extract vapour and fuel from their network, and the surrounding groundwater.
At the time of our last update, Openreach had notified retail broadband and phone providers on their network that the dangers involved meant that the problem was likely to affect their local work and services for “several months“. Naturally, it’s unsafe for their engineers to access the network until the risk is eliminated, and they’re “proceeding with extreme caution“.
Put another way, this means that they “won’t be able to fix every issue that’s reported to us” (many can be resolved remotely, but some cannot). “In these cases, we’ll be working with Communications Providers to provide alternative and temporary services until we can – for example via a mobile/wireless signal,” said Openreach (e.g. they’ve made space available in their Bramley exchange car park for providers to erect temporary mobile masts).
The fact that no physical service repairs, engineering work, fault management, end customer provision or fibre (FTTP) build can take place (i.e. at least until the immediate explosion risk is mitigated) is naturally very disruptive, and some customers will no doubt be caught out. But the latest update indicates that the clean-up work could take a very long time (also see the local council updates).
Openreach Statement (29th July 2024)
We’ve appointed environmental experts to extract vapour and fuel from our network, and the surrounding ground water, over a period of several months and this work has already begun.
Once that’s completed, we’ll need to clean the ducts and rectify any residual damage to the chambers and our cables before we can return to business as usual.
Because of the complexity safety concerns, we’ve been advised that making our network safe and accessible could take at least 12 months, but we’ll continue to update our people, partners, customers and residents on this web page as work progresses.
In the end, it remains VERY important to remember just how extraordinarily dangerous this situation is and, given the complexity of the problem, it’s not surprising that it could take a long time to resolve. Behind the scenes, there is a massive multi-organisation effort going on to tackle this and nobody is taking it for granted. We can only hope that it’s able to be safely resolved sooner, rather than later. But that reference to “at least 12 months” above may yet turn out to be optimistic.