[Infowarrior] - Metro Dig at Tysons Stirs Underground Intrigue

[Richard Forno]

(Ahhh the joys of living in the DC area..... -rick)

Metro Dig at Tysons Stirs Underground Intrigue
High Anxiety Over Top-Security Cable

By Amy Gardner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 31, 2009

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/30/AR2009053002114_pf.html

This part happens all the time: A construction crew putting up an  
office building in the heart of Tysons Corner a few years ago hit a  
fiber optic cable no one knew was there.

This part doesn't: Within moments, three black sport-utility vehicles  
drove up, a half-dozen men in suits jumped out and one said, "You just  
hit our line."

Whose line, you may ask? The guys in suits didn't say, recalled Aaron  
Georgelas, whose company, the Georgelas Group, was developing the  
Greensboro Corporate Center on Spring Hill Road. But Georgelas assumed  
that he was dealing with the federal government and that the cable in  
question was "black" wire -- a secure communications line used for  
some of the nation's most secretive intelligence-gathering operations.

"The construction manager was shocked," Georgelas recalled. "He had  
never seen a line get cut and people show up within seconds. Usually  
you've got to figure out whose line it is. To garner that kind of  
response that quickly was amazing."

Black wire is one of the looming perils of the massive construction  
that has come to Tysons, where miles and miles of secure lines are  
thought to serve such nearby agencies as the Office of the Director of  
National Intelligence, the National Counterterrorism Center and, a few  
miles away in McLean, the Central Intelligence Agency. After decades  
spent cutting through red tape to begin work on a Metrorail extension  
and the widening of the Capital Beltway, crews are now stirring up  
tons of dirt where the black lines are located.

"Yeah, we heard about the black SUVs," said Paul Goguen, the engineer  
in charge of relocating electric, gas, water, sewer, cable, telephone  
and other communications lines to make way for Metro through Tysons.  
"We were warned that if they were hit, the company responsible would  
show up before you even had a chance to make a phone call."

So far, so good, Goguen added. But the peril remains for a project  
that will spend $150 million moving more than 75 miles of conduit  
along the three-mile stretch of routes 123 and 7 that run through  
Tysons.

In the Washington area, it's a scenario that has traveled the cocktail  
party circuit for years. Shiva Pant, an administrator with the Metro  
system and a former transportation director in Fairfax County,  
recalled that an expansion of the Dulles Toll Road years ago was  
delayed when utilities that did not appear on any maps were  
discovered. The incident fueled all manner of speculation about the  
purpose and owner of the lines, he said.

Even without the presence of sensitive government operations, moving  
utilities to make way for Metrorail is a tricky and enormous  
enterprise. The Tysons-Reston corridor is home to part of MAE-East,  
one of the nation's primary Internet pipelines installed years ago by  
the government and private companies. Most major telecommunications  
carriers link to the pipeline, meaning there's a jumble of fiber optic  
wire under the Dulles rail route.

Moving utilities quickly and cheaply is a big part of any construction  
work. But the $5.2 billion rail project, which will extend service  
from Arlington County to Dulles International Airport, is particularly  
complex: It includes four stations in Tysons and a three-mile stretch  
of elevated track along the two main Tysons thoroughfares, which are  
used by more than 100,000 vehicles each day.

Construction crews have been digging for more than a year to shift the  
utility wires out of the path of the rail line, stations and support  
piers -- and they have another year to go. They have dug 30-foot-deep  
trenches and augured 250-foot conduit sleeves beneath roads. In the  
end, they will have installed more than 140 new manholes and rerouted  
the lines of more than 21 private utilities, including Dominion  
Virginia Power, Cox Cable, Verizon, AT&T and many more.

And they have snapped, accidentally, dozens of those carriers' lines,  
because even not-so-secret commercial lines sometimes don't show up on  
utility maps. Goguen, the utility manager, estimates that the rail  
project has already hit three dozen lines, sometimes doing no damage  
and other times grinding work to a halt or cutting power to retailers  
along Route 7. Even after extensively researching land records and  
maps and digging more than 600 test holes to determine utility  
locations, it's hard to avoid accidents on a project of such  
complexity and in such a busy place, he said.

"Every time we dig a hole, we run into issues that we didn't expect,"  
he said.

Such issues are likely to resurface this summer, when construction on  
a short tunnel between routes 123 and 7 is scheduled to begin. Above  
the tunnel's path, just outside Clyde's Restaurant, is a giant  
microwave communications tower operated by the U.S. Army. And if you  
want to know what the 280-foot tower is for, too bad. "The specific  
uses of the system to which this particular antenna is attached" are  
classified, Army spokesman Dave Foster said.

Other government agencies located near Tysons also had little to say.  
A CIA spokeswoman would not comment when asked about the agency's use  
of communications lines through Tysons. And Mike Birmingham, a  
spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence  
(located at the intersection of the Dulles Toll Road and Route 123),  
would say only that if a communications line used by the agency was  
cut, the nation's intelligence-gathering would carry on uninterrupted.

"No particular project puts us at risk -- highway construction,  
building construction," Birmingham said. "We don't have a single point  
of failure. Our systems are redundant."

Georgelas, the developer whose company was overseeing the work in 2000  
when the Chevrolet Suburbans drove up to the Greensboro Corporate  
Center, said he figured that the government was involved when an AT&T  
crew arrived the same day to fix the line, rather than waiting days.  
His opinion didn't change when AT&T tried to bill his company for the  
work but immediately backed down when his company balked.

"These lines are not cheap to move," Georgelas said. "They said, 'You  
owe us $300,000.' We said, 'Are you nuts?' "

The charges just disappeared.

Goguen, the engineer with the Dulles rail project, laughs at the  
stories of past encounters but has no desire to meet up with the men  
in the black SUVs.

"We've been here a year," he said, "and it hasn't happened to us yet."