Community Voices Concerns to CenturyLink

— by Lin McNulty and Margie Doyle —

Our communications is all wrapped up into cables such as these. Photo: Margie Doyle

CenturyLink Regional President Brian Stading took center stage at a public forum on Thursday, November 14, at the Orcas Senior Center, backed up by a team of nine other technical and public relations personnel. Orcas residents brought their questions, their concerns, their irritation, and their compassion to this meeting in a desire to hear answers, as well as to be heard.

“Clearly,” said Stading, “this is a difficult time.”

The fiber damage and phone outage was initially discovered by CenturyLink on Tuesday, November 5 at 4:53 a.m. when they stopped seeing a signal from the fiber. It was reported in Orcas Issues on November 11 by CenturyTel that they believed the damage was caused by a couple of small magnitude earthquakes 8 km NNW of Friday Harbor at 9:40 p.m. on Monday, November 4, and/or another one 23 km WNW of Forks, WA at 6:52 a.m. on Tuesday, November 5. The second quake occurred, however, after the outage. The cause has since been revised to “unknown.”

“We don’t believe we will ever know what happened,” stated Stading. “There is no evidence of anchor drag. We can only determine something happened; they just don’t break on their own.” The severed cable was brand new in 1999. Although Stading claimed this one cable has more capability than the islands would ever need, many expressed concerns about the lack of redundancy.

After waiting for a projector from OIFR, photos of ongoing site work were shown on a screen behind Stading, but no explanation or clarification was offered about what was being seen in the slideshow.

To their credit, CenturyLink put together some inventive and ingenious fixes to get services restored; 911 service to all islands was restored within two and a half days. At press time, however, 911 service on Lopez is once again spotty and not completely reliable.  Switch issues also continue to intermittently impact Orcas and Lopez phone service as additional capacity is spliced in.

During the 911 outage on Orcas, Lopez, and Shaw, local agencies, such as Orcas Fire and Rescue, put emergency protocols into place, and advised local residents as quickly as possible that calls for police, fire, and medical emergencies were to be routed through the fire department business lines where volunteers were on duty to receive calls; radio communication with the Sheriff’s Office dispatchers was (and remains) available.

CenturyLink needed to find 6,000 feet of cable and reached out across the globe to  locate the equipment. The necessary cable was available in Norway, Sweden, Brazil, and—luckily— in Kent, Washington. When they needed a specialized fiber splicing  case, they found one available in Spain, but determined it would be quicker to actually build one.

Divers required a special gas mixture that is only available in California in order to be able to go to the necessary depths. As the divers return to the surface, they must spend a couple of hours at a depth of 200 feet before surfacing. Once back on the barge they then have three minutes to enter one of two hyperbaric chambers on board.

They built a mobile manufacturing facility in 36 hours. Normally,  it takes two-three months. Because the severed cable lay close to OPALCO power cable, extra care was taken to not damage OPALCO lines. Eventually three tugboats were brought to the site to stabilize the remote operating vehicle (ROV).

Thirty-five people at any one time have been working around the clock, along with OPALCO (as we are well aware), to fully restore service. “We are not taking this lightly. We are working on getting redundancy built in,” Stading stressed.

Until last week, there was no plan for this type of failure. “Once we get this restoration up and running,” assured Stading, “this will all be reviewed to build in redundancy, looking at what is available on island as well as off island.”

Stading acknowledged there have been lots of rumors and miscommunications, but that CenturyLink remains dedicated to “not saying” something that isn’t fundamentally accurate.

Foremost in most attendees’ minds was how CenturyLink will reimburse for losses. That will be looked at,” said Stading, “and CenturyLink will do the fair and right thing.” This is not their first outage and they have experience with those taking advantage of a situation to receive compensation. The community is to be assured that CenturyLink will pro-actively pursue compensation, although any adjustment might not show up on the next bill, as they are still working on the immediate problem. It was not clear how the process might unfold, whether each customer will need to pursue compensation, or whether it will automatic.

Is it correct to say that everything eventually goes through CenturyLink? Not everything, but a good majority of all our data and voice communication does.

Senior Center Director Marla Johns pointed out that a woman lay on floor for three days because her Medical Alert device was unable to dial out. She made sure that CenturyLink realizes this has “impacted health and safety in a way we cannot put a price tag on.”

County Council Member Rick Hughes explained he will be working with all providers over the next few months, putting a lot of pressure on CenturyLink to resolve this and do whatever it takes to make sure this does not happen again. A Press Release will soon be coming from the County with instructions on how to report business losses to the Small Business Administration.

So, is this fully resolved? The simple answer is “no.” Spotty and sporadic outages are still possible in all areas as the interim network becomes overloaded, or new connections are made. They are not able to give a time estimate for complete restoration because of so many variables, including weather, equipment, and currents. The cable is now spliced, but not yet put back into place. Stading “promised” we will be back in full service before Obamacare takes effect (March 2014).