Nine Airmen face 3,000+ wires, one big job

  • Published
  • By Master Sgt. Jon Hanson
  • 407th Air Expeditionary Group Public Affairs
ALI AIR BASE, Iraq --  They are responsible for miles and miles of cable and wire just so everyone can communicate here and to the world. The job has them working above and below ground, fighting all the elements of the desert climate.

This responsibility lies with the 407th Expeditionary Communications Squadron’s Base Information Infrastructure shop here.

This nine-person shop says busy maintaining the telephones and wiring, copper cable, fiber optic cable and local area network cabling for the Air Force at this base.

The shop is a mix of telephone maintenance, cable maintenance, computer network switching cryptographic maintenance and computer communication technicians.

The different job specialties for these Airmen mean more work at the beginning of the rotation.

“A lot of our workcenter is not doing the job they were trained to do,” said Tech. Sgt. Dan Dvorak, NCO in charge of the 407th ECS BII shop. “We had to do a lot of training right off the bat to get things running smoothly.”

The BII shop has had to tackle several major projects this rotation.

One of the on-going projects is moving the main distribution frame which services all Ali Base telephone, local area network and special circuits from one building to a tactical shelter. The new shelter is a dust free environment and should improve the life of the fiber and copper cables.

“This entails moving 350 strands of fiber and 3,500 pair of copper cables,” Sergeant Dvorak said, who is deployed here from Tinker Air Force Base, Okla. “This [moving the main distribution frame] has never been done before and is a major undertaking for our workcenter.”

This might seem insignificant to other people, but the Airmen here are dealing with a few thousand wires – each one requiring individual attention.

“It took us 11 days with five people to move the 350 strands of fiber,” Sergeant Dvorak said. “The copper is going on right now. It [took] three days with four people to splice 500 pairs of copper [wire]. The 3,500 pairs of copper has to be spliced twice to install the section of cable we need to reach the new manholes.”

The splicing requires placement of 25 different colored wires into color-coded slots on a 710 splice machine. The machine trims the wire’s end on one side. The step is repeated with the other end of the wires and then merged together with “Side A.” All this work is done in humid and water-filled manholes.

One of the limiting factors they have had to overcome was the shape of manholes. Many of them were collapsed so all of the wiring had to be moved to new manholes. Others were just crowded with cables.

Another undertaking they faced was moving telephone and network connections for a half dozen offices from one building to another.

For many of the members of the BII shop this deployment has been harder here than at their homestation but very rewarding.

“I think that the job is harder here. Being from the 3rd Combat Communications Group [at Tinker AFB], we train constantly to initially set up our communications equipment,” said Senior Airman Melissa Curry. “I’ve learned so much by coming here, such as the art of pulling cable, fusion splicing fiber optic cable together, how the telephone network operates on a base wide scale, etc.”