The fascinating thing about subsea cables and pipelines, but especially subsea cables, is not just that we are utterly dependent on them. They don’t sit only within countries’ territorial waters. They connect countries, so they are in international waters [where] countries don’t have jurisdiction. The oceans are a global commons, and that’s where cables live, and that’s why it’s so utterly important for countries and everybody using the oceans to take care around them so that they don’t get damaged.
Then what we have seen in the past few years is that, all of a sudden, merchant vessels in the Baltic Sea and off the coast of Norway and in Taiwanese waters, all of a sudden, they got extremely sloppy and dragged anchors for long stretches, which is something that is not supposed to happen as a seafarer. You should know whether your anchor is dragging on the seabed or not, and you know where the cables are.
So this is not supposed to happen, and yet it happened not just once, not just twice, but several times, and caused considerable anxiety, obviously, in the countries affected. It also caused considerable expenses to the operators because they have to get the cables repaired, and in the case of the electricity cables, it’s extremely expensive to repair them and takes a very long time.
We don’t know what has caused these merchant vessels to drag their anchors across the border sea and damage cables, and we may never know because it’s not like those crew members are going to tell us what happened. We just know that these incidents were extremely suspicious.
deleted by creator