Telecommunications company Pacific Bell has agreed to remove eight miles of abandoned telephone cables from Lake Tahoe as part of a legal settlement between the company and environmentalists who allege the cables are contaminating the water.
The cables were first discovered by Monique Rydel Fortner and Seth Jones, professional divers and co-founders of environmental nonprofit Below the Blue, in 2012.
Fortner and Jones were removing trash from the lake when they stumbled upon the curious sight.
"At first we were like, 'What the heck is that,' " Jones recalled. "I've never quite seen a cable like that. I thought it was a power cable at first."
After some further digging, they found the cables had been there for decades, the oldest since 1929.
PacBell, an AT&T subsidiary, has used fiber-optic phone cables for more than three decades, according to a news release the Center for Enviromental Health issued on Wednesday after the settlement. The abandoned cables are made of copper transmission wires covered by a "heavy lead sheath."
There are around three pounds of lead per foot of cable.
"We had the whole contents of the whole thing analyzed, and that's when we realized … it has nearly 20,000 pounds of lead per mile," said Jones.
Concerned about the possible contamination in the water, portions of the cable were tested.
"We submerged a 3-foot length of the cable in a plastic tub full of Lake Tahoe water," Bill Verick, the attorney for the case, said in the press release. "After one day, the test results showed 600 micrograms of lead per liter in the water. After three more days, it was up to 1200 micrograms per liter."
Just a concentration of a quarter microgram of lead per liter would require a consumer warning notice, and that level in a source of drinking water is illegal in California, according to the release.
The nonprofit California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA) sued PacBell for the alleged contamination.
AT&T officials said they also did a sampling of the cables, and did not detect any release of lead into Lake Tahoe.
"We are committed to preserving one of the most scenic freshwater lakes in the Sierra Nevada. We have agreed to remove these cables because they are no longer in use, however, we dispute any notion that they were a source of pollution," an AT&T spokesman said in a statement to KCBS Radio.
Jones is satisfied with the result of the settlement, calling it "huge."
"There's all kinds of different debris in Tahoe that are kind of really out of sight out of mind," he said. "This is one of the biggest ones we’re most passionate about because it’s such an imminent concern with the lead."
