For the second time in three months, internet service in Ketchikan was taken down by vandals in British Columbia, where a landline telecommunications cable feeds the undersea link that provides service to Ketchikan.

Before noon on Aug. 2, Ketchikan Public Utilities Telecommunications Division was alerted that its internet service was down. Service was completely restored by 10 p.m. that evening.

Telecommunications Division Manager Matt McLaren said vandals in British Columbia had cut a service line between Burns Lake and Frazier Lake in hopes of stealing copper wire.

“They climbed the pole and ripped some of the fiber cable down,” he said in an interview the day after the outage in Ketchikan.

High copper prices have made the metal attractive to thieves who can resell what they steal.

“Our partners in Canada had to dispatch their crews out to go make the repairs, which took a little bit of time because it was in a remote area,” McLaren said.

Ketchikan’s downstream provider 90 miles away in British Columbia is CityWest, which gets its signal from a larger provider, Telus.

A nearly identical vandalism event occurred on May 4, which caused an internet outage affecting thousands of customers in northwest British Columbia and Ketchikan.

During an interview in May, Ketchikan Public Utilities Telecom Network Operations and Engineering Manager Daniel White said customers should not have to wait much longer for a new undersea fiber cable to be completed that will connect Prince Rupert directly to Vancouver, B.C. The existing landline would then serve as backup.

“They’ve been working on it for a few years now, but they’ve had some struggles making it happen technically. It goes straight from Prince Rupert to Vancouver and it’s pretty close to completion, but at the final miles they’re having a few issues,” White said in May.

White said the landline that stretches northward to Prince Rupert is a single line, making it more susceptible to internet loss in the case of damage with no backup line.