Montargis (Loiret): riot and sabotage go hand in hand

Infrastructure destroyed during the riots, then acts of sabotage on [fiber] cabinets
La République du Centre, July 26, 2023 (excerpt)

Hundreds of residents in the Sirène and Chaussée neighborhoods have been without Internet and telephone service for weeks now, due to rioting and sabotage of fiber network cabinets.

It’s a recurring message on social networks over the last few days, on groups dealing with daily life in Montargis: many residents of the Sirène and Chaussée districts have pointed out that they no longer have an Internet network, and are wondering about the potential end of the outage, which is linked for many to the violent riots that took place on the nights of June 29 and 30.

Although some equipment was damaged during the two nights of urban violence, particularly in the Sirène district and in the city center, this was not the only problem. According to Orange, the operator who created and manages the fiber network in Montargis, after June 29 and 30, five cabinets were sabotaged: on the weekend of July 1, “rue Villa-Renée-de-France, rue Émile-Moreau and rue Vauban, leaving 553 subscribers without telecommunication service at home” and on July 14, in the Chaussée district, leaving another 425 subscribers without telecommunication service at home.

Why is it taking so long to repair, ask subscribers? “In cases where cabinets have been sabotaged, we have to redo studies to rebuild the network. All that takes time. Our technicians are working non-stop” adds Orange, whose teams, in the summer of 2023, are already very busy with copper theft on the historic network in the Centre-Val de Loire region, as in Fontenay-sur-Loing on May 31.

The operator is quick to point to an “explosion” in these acts: “48 in 2022, 178 at the beginning of July 2023. A cable order is delivered within a minimum lead time of three-weeks; to this a week’s work to pull the new cables underground and rewire the lines of all the operators’ subscribers must be added.”

via:sansnom translated by Act for freedom now!