The dig that grounded five airports

The airspace around Newark is managed from a control facility in Philadelphia, which depends on communication lines leased from Verizon. That Monday an old circuit serving it failed — it was already scheduled for replacement — and the system switched to the backup line. The backup was the cable the crew had just cut. The main line failed because it was old; the backup failed because it had been dug up. The two had nothing to do with each other, and there was no third line.

In spring 2025 the same facility lost its links and radar picture on Newark several times in a few weeks. The answer was more lines and separate paths — bought as equipment under a contract, not written as a new rule about digging or about how buried lines are recorded.

Before you dig in the United States you call a number, and the owners of buried lines come out and mark what is underneath. The marks are colour-coded by kind of line: orange for communications, yellow for gas, red for electric power. In New Jersey the paint may be up to 18 inches from the real line, and nobody may use a machine within two feet of a mark; inside that zone you dig by hand.

By NJ Transit's account the crew was about ten feet away. If that figure holds, either the paint was not over the cable or this cable was not painted at all. Verizon says its cable was where it should be, and that it is the contractor's job to ask for the right stretch of ground to be marked. The investigation is checking who marked it, and how.

And even perfect paint says only what kind of line it is. Nothing says what depends on it. The orange over a line to a single house and the orange over the backup for a region's airspace are the same orange, under the same rules.

Two kinds of line get stricter rules: pipelines, because of what they carry, and emergency call lines, because of what depends on them. Under a 2006 law the federal pipeline safety agency checks how each state enforces its digging rules and, where enforcement is inadequate, can go after the digger directly. Telecommunications lines are outside it. New Jersey's own law draws the same kind of line: break its digging rules near an ordinary buried line and the fine is capped at $25,000 for a series of violations; near a gas line the ceiling is $2,000,000. The rules know how to charge more for what a line carries, not for what depends on it.

After a 2012 storm knocked out 911 service in several states, the FCC required companies that carry emergency calls to certify every year that the critical lines into each call centre really run separately, that those lines are tagged, and that no single point is left where one cut takes everything out. Air traffic control has no outside rule of either kind; the FAA's internal standard for separate lines binds the agency itself, not the phone company's records or the people digging.

This is not a story about careless officials. These rules are born after a specific disaster, inside whichever agency owned it, covering exactly what it touched. A different colour on the ground would not have moved a machine ten feet from the paint, and on a morning when the main line failed from age and the backup was cut, even the 911 rule might not have helped. What it does is name someone who must know where a critical line runs. For this line, no outside rule gave anyone that job.

In 1969 in Birmingham, England, a contractor with an excavator cut the power cable feeding a steel works — having been given plans showing where the cables were. The court awarded the ruined metal and its profit, and refused the profit lost during some fourteen hours of darkness, as a matter of policy: that kind of loss spreads too far. The same limit still holds in most of the United States. Whether a mistake is in the digging or in the marking, whoever made it may pay a state fine and the cost of the cable. Not the flights.

An industry group put the cost of damage to buried lines in the US in 2025 at $83.2 billion. Repairing the lines was about 6 per cent of it: for every dollar spent fixing a damaged line, about sixteen more landed on everyone else.

The exception sits in New Jersey. In 1985 the state Supreme Court heard a case brought by People Express, an airline based at Newark whose offices had been evacuated after a fire at a nearby rail yard, and ruled that it could in principle sue for purely financial losses — the exceptions courts kept making, it said, exposed the "hopeless artificiality" of the blanket ban. In the decades since, that has stayed a minority view. And even there, a company digging a trench or a crew painting marks cannot pay for a day of grounded flights.

Nobody has found a fair way to send the whole bill for an outage to whoever caused it. What the real designs change is who pays to make it less likely.

The government. A legal class for lines that other critical systems depend on, as gas pipelines already have one: taxpayers fund federal oversight of how they are marked, and whoever gets it wrong pays a higher fine sized to the danger, not to the outage. Price: a list of critical lines is also a map of what to attack, and every owner will want on it — a class everyone joins stops being a class.

The owners, through one shared map. Britain's Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 makes its register of underground pipes and cables official; once the detailed rules are in force owners must upload their routes and pay to run it. By September 2026 more than 400 owners had added data. Price: time and old records — much of what is underground was recorded decades ago, on paper, often wrongly, and the register is not expected to be full before 2027. And an official map is trusted more, so every entry still wrong becomes more dangerous.

The customer. The agency that depends on a line buys more independence: a third path, and an independent check of where every path actually runs. Price: money, with limits this story shows — after 2025 the agency had paid for separate paths and still lost both lines. Each extra path costs more and protects against less, across hundreds of facilities, while Congress was being asked in 2026 for another $17.5 billion just to finish modernising the system.

On that Monday an old circuit failed, and the line meant to cover for it had just been cut. The investigation will say who made the mistake, if anyone did. It will not change this: the rules asked the same thing of that cable as of a line to a garden shed. Most of the cost landed on airlines and their passengers.