Complex sentence: If the line is directly buried, then dirt will usually fill in any gap, causing a signal outage; howeever, if in a sealed cable liner, a break may leave the two cable ends lined up enough for gap loss to occur.
Split into simpler sentences: If the line is directly buried, then dirt will usually fill in any gap, causing a signal outage. But if in a sealed cable liner, a break may leave the two cable ends lined up enough for gap loss to occur.