Yesterday ALSY became glitchy again while it was raining. Wild guess in the control room was that somehow it might have to do with the known fact that a part of the fibers outside was exposed due to erosion of the dirt covering the cables.

Since I have never seen how the ALSY fibers  were exposed or for that matter supposed to be buried, I took a mini hike to mid station using off road path. Attached are the pictures of the place where I was able to see some cable exposed, maybe 20 or 30 meters from the MY toward the corner. This is the only place where I was able to see bare cables between the corner and MY though there were many places where white PVC was exposed.

Broken PVC pipe segments were on top of the cables, and there were many fresh-looking signs of animal traffic along and across the fiber.

I can imagine that raindrops or small rocks hitting the cable, or PVC rolling on top of it when windy, or animals walking on top of it might cause some kind of glitches, assuming that one of these is ALS fiber (which I'm not sure about).