PHONE SABOTAGE IN SAN JOSE:

Santa Clara County officials have declared a local emergency after they said someone intentionally cut an underground fiber optic cable in south San Jose, causing a widespread phone service outage in southern Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties today that included disruption to 911 emergency phone service.

John Britton, a spokesman for AT&T, said it appears somebody opened a manhole in South San Jose, climbed down eight to 10 feet and cut four or five fiber-optic cables.Britton also said there was a report of underground cables being cut in San Carlos. . . . “We’ve never to this extent in recent history had this kind of phone outage,” said Gilroy police Sgt. Jim Gillio.

ATMs in South Santa Clara County were not working.

Saint Louise Regional Hospital in Gilroy cancelled all elective surgeries in response to the emergency, according to county officials.

“It’s kind of like an earthquake” said Jack Ahlin, a driver with T. Marx Towing who was standing outside the Gilroy police department.

An earthquake that can be caused by one guy with some clippers. Lots of communities are at risk for this sort of thing, as infrastructure is neither hard enough, nor fault-tolerant enough, to survive such attacks. That needs to be fixed.