AS technicians battle to restore service to storm-hit areas, chief executive officer at Digicel Stephen Murad is warning that network recovery is being crippled by a wave of vandalism and theft, with criminals cutting fibre cables and draining fuel from generators meant to keep communities connected after Hurricane Melissa.

Murad, who addressed the Infrastructure and Physical Development Committee of Parliament, at Gordon House, on Wednesday, said the acts of sabotage have become a major obstacle to the company’s restoration efforts across Jamaica.

He noted that, while Digicel had made significant progress in bringing services back online, thieves and vandals continue to undo those gains overnight.

“I would have written to Minister [Daryl] Vaz on Saturday night, and I called the [Police] Commissioner [Kevin Blake] — we’re seeing a huge spike, unfortunately, in vandalism to our network. You’ve got potential copper theft; we don’t have copper in the fibre network — it’s plastic and glass, but people see a black cable and they’ll chop it and see what happens, and then they’ll go 300 yards down the road to the same cable and chop it again,” Murad said.

The result, he explained, is a painstaking and expensive repair process that often sets back restoration timelines by days.

“When you splice a fibre you only see one break, because it’s light you go and fix the break, test it, and then you go, ‘Oh, no, there’s another break 200 yards away…’ It’s a very painful process,” he said.

Murad added that, in some cases, Digicel technicians have had to suspend recovery operations in one area to return to previously repaired sites that were deliberately damaged.

“All that does is stop us recovering people, because you’ve got to go back to it. So we’ve got to stop the recovery of the people who don’t have service to go back and re-fix what it is,” he said.

The Digicel boss noted that the company’s challenges go beyond deliberate damage. Some incidents, he said, were unintentional, caused by the fast-paced reconstruction work of other agencies.

“As JPS [Jamaica Public Service] are trying to go very, very fast replanting the poles, they are damaging what is called our fragile infrastructure,” he explained. “Because, if you think about it, the cable that we’ve had to run has got nowhere to go; it is quite frankly in the bush, that is a fact of life, so it is a very fragile, thin thread [that] a lot of the network infrastructure across the country is held on by as well. So every day there is network damage generally through rebuild, it could also be clearing of the roads…” Murad added.

He made clear, however, that his remarks were not aimed at criticising other agencies.

“This is not me really having a go at the NWA [National Works Agency] or JPS. I understand the country is hurting and we need to recover quickly, but that [can be] damaging… We get a lot of phone calls and messages, somebody says, ‘Stephen, I [had service] all through the storm, what happened?’ and that will happen — it’s happening every day,” he added.

He pointed to two major fibre breaks that occurred just this week in Kingston after two separate truck incidents damaged Digicel’s underground network.

“Both of our rings in Kingston and Spanish Town were hit — snapped all of the fibre — [it] immediately takes all of your home Internet customers offline, all of your businesses offline that use our services as well, and that’s not hurricane-related, but that’s the reality,” Murad said.

He also emphasised that fuel theft has also compounded the company’s difficulties with hundreds of generators running on diesel to power cell sites across the island, noting that some locations have been repeatedly targeted by criminals.

“It took them seven hours for us to fill that up, you know a very difficult terrain, you know we’ve had lots of landslides… but those guys are risking life and limb to keep the generators going to keep the customers online, to keep the sites going, and then the next day we get a warning that there’s no fuel in the tank and we’re like, “Like, seriously!’ ” he expressed, noting that up to 120 gallons of fuel have been stolen.

He praised the Counter-Terrorism and Organised Crime (C-TOC) Division of the Jamaica Constabulary Force for its support in investigating the incidents, noting that there have been “some successes this year”.

However, Murad stressed that stronger penalties and a national cultural shift were needed to curb what he described as “mindless acts of vandalism”.

“I know we’ve been pushing for harsher penalties in terms of legislation, but we need to really change. I think it’s also from a society perspective. We need everybody pushing… this stuff is just intentional, and it’s just not acceptable,” he said.