[Kzyxtalk] The internet outage_who's reporting?

[King Collins]

((The internet outage on the coast and what to do about it. This is an issue that Norm De Vall would be on top of. Where are the supervisors on this issue? Note also that Mendocino  TV not KZYX is following down on this. Thanks a lot to Terry Vaughn who  wrote this message, and he ran the camera when Mendocino TV televised a couple meetings of the KZYX board. --king))

Mendocino TV was out to the site twice, the night it happened and then 
the next day. The circumstances are murky but the latest is that the 
damage may have been a lowboy trailer with some machinery on the back. 
Still, no one can vouch for the height of the cable either.
The cable was placed on poles because there were problems boring the 
road at that section. The other side of the road was marshy and the bore 
wasn't steering well. The county yanked the permit to protect their 
road, so AT&T had to go aerial for 4 spans before diving into the ground 
again.
When I visited Sunday night they were still assessing the damage. It was 
extensive and was damaged in all 4 spans. The conduit was plugged from 
the manhole out so they couldn't pull any slack.
The next day there were splicer trailers, ladder trucks and a crew of 
repairmen pulling up and attaching to trees a temporary fix of 3 smaller 
fiber cables to span over the damaged section. Service had been restored 
for 45 minutes that morning before another splice knocked the first one 
off the air. That was when it was becoming apparent that there was more 
trouble further up the span.
A trauma of this nature can whiplash throughout the span and shatter in 
multiple spots. Hence 6500 feet of replacement fiber.
Due to the extent of the damage I'm always amazed at how quickly the 
local guys can repair a catastrophic event.
I was skeptical when I heard they were going to get 6500 ft of fiber and 
place it by 7pm. I was amazed then when service came back on at 3:45.
Sage at MCN called it right when he said the coast needs to be part of a 
self healing fiber ring  which will fix itself, not a fiber stub that, 
when cut off, bleeds.
It's expense to place fiber. AT&T will never build a self healing fiber 
ring unless our county supervisors and mayors take this failure as a 
warning of what can happen when we lose 1 small link to the outside world.
Our leaders need to work with the state and telecom companies to restore 
our confidence in the network. The Mendocino Coast needs a diverse path 
for telecommunications off the coast.
What business or college would invest in a place where a car accident 
can cause so much economic damage.
Doctors, Dentists, Emergency personnel were affected. So were the 
communities of Comptche, Little River, Albion and Mendocino.
Kudos to Tom Allman for taking this seriously and staffing the coast 
with 24 hr coverage during this time and to the volunteers that staffed 
Comptche, Mendocino and Albion - Little River Fire Stations for keeping 
open for emergency assistance.
AT&T's crew handled the catastrophic failure with incredible efficiency 
and skill yet they're just reacting to something that wouldn't happen if 
we had a self healing network"
Talk to your county supervisors to develop an emergency preparedness 
plan that accounts for this event happening again because it will.
Terry Vaughn

-- 
Editor
www.mendocinotv.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.mcn.org/pipermail/kzyxtalk/attachments/20140805/b6dc85e9/attachment.html