And then it was gone...

Where the old post-office stood. Home to various departments over the years (English, Corrientes, Guest Ministries, Copy Shop, and others), the building was torn down Saturday morning to make way for more parking spaces.

As each parking space provides income to help offset costs of ministry, and the office space was no longer needed (and the building required upgrades), it made sense to tear it down.

The biggest headache for the Systems department was that all the phone lines (107 in total) for the Hospital and the Radio ran unprotected underneath this building. The punch-blocks for connecting the lines from the phone company to our own internal cables was also built into the wall of this building.

Fortunately, there was enough spare cable under the building to move the interconnect box about 2 meters away from the building. After removing the floor the work crew was able to knock holes in the foundation and dig a trench and bury the cables to protect them from the falling building and the required work afterwards for finishing the parking.

This unfortunately wasn't enough to protect from being cut, one cable carrying 10 phone lines.

We took out the cables which were no longer being used so as not to cause confusion. However, the confusion arose in the time between determining which cables were to be cut and actually cutting them, which for this particular operation, transpired in about five (5) seconds, the time between identifying the cable and reaching over to pick up the hacksaw. The cable to be cut contained fiber-optics, but when the saw hit copper we knew something was amiss.

The good news is that there was still enough cable that we were able to pull it out to the new location of the interconnect box and re-punch the cable, restoring phone service to those lines.