Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!bu.edu!telecom-request From: jkw@kodak.com (Jerry K. Wagner Internet: jkw@kodak.com) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: The Order of Repair Message-ID: Date: 20 Mar 91 14:37:45 GMT Sender: news@bu.edu.bu.edu Reply-To: jkw@kodak.com Organization: TELECOM Digest Lines: 46 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 221, Message 2 of 13 > In TELECOM Digest V11 #210, John Higdon writes: > What is interesting is the order in which the services were restored... > As it turned out, telephone service was restored by late afternoon, > about twenty-four hours after the outage began. Not very impressive. If you lived in Rochester Tel land, you would most likely consider 24 hours to be impressive. Since I moved to my current address, I have had at least two unexplained service interruptions (not-storm or disaster related) and it took at least two days for each one to be fixed. During the recent ice storm, I lost service on March 4. I called Rochester Tel that afternoon and was told my phone would be fixed by 9 PM on March 6. I certainly didn't believe that! On March 12, I called again. The phone company would not give me any idea when the repair people would be in my neighborhood. (Meanwhile, Rochester Gas and Electric was being told by the county government to at least give people an estimate.) I called Rochester Tel again on March 16 and I was told the repair people were going street by street and no estimate was given. Later that day, we found New York Telephone people down the street who were going house-to-house to repair services. These repair people hadn't even been given a list of people who didn't have service, so we gave them my address and asked them to be sure to stop at our house. > So it breaks down like this: > The cable company had its act together. Its service restoral (while > hardly essential) was first rate. PG&E took three hours to restore > service. PG&E is probably the worst electric utility on the planet so > for them it was probably miraculous. Never mind that the fire was > originally started by primary wires arcing in the trees because PG&E > felt it unnecessary to do any trimming. But wiping up the rear was > Pac*Bell, who was too wimpy to even begin work on its cable until the > next day. I disagree with the use of the term "wimpy." PG&E personnel are trained and equipped to work with high voltage equipment and the phone company is not. If the trees were arcing, there could have been other damage to the equipment, such as broken insulators and broken high-voltage wires. I can't blame the phone company personnel for not wanting to be exposed to foreign voltages on their equipment until PG&E got their problems solved.