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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

> Clearly the cable breaks are not accidents when previously there weren't any for years and now in the last year we've had so many that I've lost count.

Has there really been no other accidents like these? It feels like this is something that been happening for a long time, but not until recently the news started reporting on it.

I seem to remember some event back in 2022 already, around Bornholm I think. I'm sure there are more as well, damaged communication lines seems to happen all the time.

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There have been accidents like this, but they were few and far between. There have not been this many accidents in such a short timespan, limited to such a small geographical area. There have been ships that have lost their anchors doing this, they've been shown to drag their anchors over the cables multiple times. These are deliberate actions.

> These are deliberate actions.

Have any of them actually been confirmed to be deliberate actions, or is this your hypothesis? Last time I checked on older incidents, they seem to all have been proper accidents, but I haven't checked on the last ones.

> There have not been this many accidents in such a short timespan, limited to such a small geographical area.

Yeah, ~7 events in the last 12 months (or what it is) does sound like a lot. I'm having a hard time finding some credible source listing all incidents though, so we could compare year-by-year, because I'm sure the news also reports a lot more about it, than before.

Have we gotten captains to confess as to why they dragged the anchor at specific times over the cables? No. We do have records showing that the ships have sailed across the cables multiple times, slowing down every time they have passed them.

I think it happens a lot more often than you think, and current news reporting also skews the perspective one get.

Linked from another comment: https://blog.telegeography.com/what-happens-when-submarine-c...

> Cable faults are common. On average, there are over 100 each year. [...] Unintentional damage from fishing vessels and ships dragging anchors account for two-thirds of all cable faults.

100 each year would be one every three days, but of course you don't read about all them in the news.

I'm not saying none of the cable breakages are sabotage, I/we don't know. As far as we know, I don't think we have any cases (with or without confession) where we can be 100% it's intentional, at least yet.

100 cable "faults", but only 2/3-rd are from ships. And, then, how many of those have been in the Baltic Sea in prior years? 66 incidents per year sounds like a lot, but there are so many cables and shipping lanes all over the world.

Read the linked page, and its infographic. 38% + 25% = 63% ~ "two thirds". There are another 11% caused by "human activity", it's just neither "fishing" (trawler nets) nor "anchorage", but "other", which could even be a keel severing the cable close to shore.

https://blog.telegeography.com/hs-fs/hubfs/2017/submarine-ca...

74% human caused (38% fishing, 25% anchorage, 11% other)

14% environmental (8% natural, 6% abrasion)

12% neither human nor environmental (6% component failure, 6% other)

"Deliberate sabotage and shark bites are exceedingly rare"

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