Monday, November 11, 2013

In The Dark - Day 7

Even if telecommunications are not flowing freely quite yet, information about our telecommunications situation is improving. A State of Emergency still exists. The situation is much improved but still far from normal.

The County issued a press release yesterday, which can be found online in several places. It says that landline service has been restored to normal. Let us know if that's true. Also, there are several reports about a barge being used to locate the failure point in the cable. There is no word that CenturyLink has precisely located the failure yet, so there is no official news on a possible cause either (or the exact fix needed). The fix is believed to require the laying of between 6,000 and 14,000 feet (worst case) of new cable. Final repairs are still several days away, which I suppose is obvious since we are a week into the disruption and they haven't even identified the failure location yet.

DEM has some Facebook posts about coverage by the Seattle Times and about cell phone service. Also, as color background to recent events, the Facebook page of the Lopez Island History Museum has an interesting post and photo of the early days of telephone service in the islands.

Early days of telephone service (switchboard on left) on Lopez, courtesy of Lopez History Museum, click to go to the Museum's Facebook page.

8 comments:

  1. I am stunned. To date, no mention of a grant has been made to solve this situation. I thought grants were the panacea.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rumor has it that the volume of grant applications from the County -- when you combine the frantic money-grubbing pleas from the MRC, AAOG/LIO, Conservation District, SJPT, Land Bank, Friends, Kwiaht, Stewardship Network, ECONet, and others -- burned up the cable. The poor optical cable didn't stand a chance. The volume of grant requests expanded exponentially until the rate of expansion exceeded the speed of light, resulting in a worm hole that propelled part of the cable quantum-fashion to another multiverse.

    Theoretically, while the worm hole was open, two-way transfer of matter and energy was possible, so not only was a portion of our optical cable transported to another time and dimension, but we might have received something in return from another world. Note that this happened on election day, which may explain some of our election results.

    ReplyDelete
  3. @2:57

    Uh oh! Now you did it. The last thing that we needed was for someone to suggest another opportunity for a grant.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anyone else think this is a clever ploy by Centurytel to snag the Obamacare website maintenance contract?

    I think, given their record, they should be in serious contention.

    ReplyDelete
  5. So a Higgs Boson walks into a Catholic church. Priest says, "Sorry you'll have to leave, we don't allow your kind here." The Higgs Boson replies: "How can that be? Without me you'd have no Mass."

    ReplyDelete
  6. A photon checks into a hotel. The bellhop says, "Can I help you with your luggage?" The photon says, "I don't have any. I'm traveling light."

    ReplyDelete
  7. Golly, I thought we at least had some of our own boats here. But oh no we gotta use handout photos from C-Tel.

    A good journalism side piece would have been, and still is, to interview a diver doing work on this developing major project.

    Also, can't help it, but it is refreshing, I think, to see tiny OPALCO bailing out one of the biggest of the big.

    If nothing else we all can be proud of our own OPALCO. These people always seem to get it done.

    ReplyDelete
  8. He'll who needs grants, why not just print up money like the big boys do. Years ago coming to this county fool that I am thought I was leaving all that was corrupt governmental missuse of power money grubbing grants fascism all that funny huh older and smarter now locking down.

    ReplyDelete