CenturyLink is pushing fiber to dams in Oregon and Washington to help the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers modernize its infrastructure.
The network operator won five contracts valued at a total of $3.4 million over five years. The contracts were awarded over the past year by the General Service Administration's IT Schedule 70 contract.
CenturyLink's fiber will provide high-speed data transmission services to the Ice Harbor, Little Goose and Lower Granite Dams along the lower Snake River in Washington, and the Foster and Green Peters Dams along the Columbia River in Oregon, as part of the dam safety program.
The dams serve as multi-use critical infrastructure facilities that provide flood risk management, hydropower, navigation, environmental stewardship, fish and wildlife conservation, and recreation benefits.
CenturyLink's Ethernet solution will eliminate the need for specialized high-voltage safety protection equipment, as well as the use of legacy copper cable that was old and, in some places, chewed up by gophers. (Caddy Shack's Carl Spackler must have not been available to terminate the gophers.)
"By replacing the legacy copper cables and modernizing the network with fiber, CenturyLink is helping the Army Corps of Engineers improve its safety posture and better protect critical infrastructure at five dams in Oregon and Washington," said David Young, CenturyLink senior vice president, public sector, in a statement.
Founded in 1802, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers operates and maintains approximately 700 dams nationwide and in Puerto Rico.
RELATED: CenturyLink nets 15-year, $470M Social Security contract
Last month, CenturyLink announced it was awarded a 15-year contract with the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) that's worth up to $470 million. Also in January, CenturyLink was awarded a $1.6 billion contract with the U.S. Department of Interior (DoI), as well as a U.S. Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) contract that's worth up to $75 million. Last year CenturyLink won a contract to provide connectivity for NASA.
All of those contracts, or task orders, were awarded by the General Services Administration's Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) program. CenturyLink was the first supplier last year to garner the authority to operate under the GSA's 15-year, $50 billion EIS program.
EIS was designed to award various contracts to vendors that help federal agencies to buy and update their IT and telecommunications infrastructure services. It's an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) program that serves as the follow-on to GSA's Networks, WITS3 and regional telecommunications services contracts.