— from Suzanne Olson —
A contractor working for OPALCO dug into a CenturyLink fiber cable in Friday Harbor and put 911 and long-distance phone services out of service for about 12 hours on Wednesday, July 2nd. Technical staff and management from OPALCO and CenturyLink worked cooperatively to repair the broken fiber. An investigation is underway into the adequacy of the utility location services which are always performed before digging.
“We apologize to all those inconvenienced,” said Assistant General Manager Foster Hildreth, “and send our gratitude to the team who worked late into the night to make repairs so that the outage didn’t extend into the holiday weekend.”
Island Fire and EMS departments responded to the outage with on-call paramedics, door-to-door public awareness calls and additional stand-by volunteers. In case of a 911 outage, San Juan County residents are encouraged to try the land line number for their island, or go to the fire station for help. It’s also important to check on your neighbors and anyone you know who may be at risk. The OPALCOcares network at island ferry landings is an additional safety net for connection via the Internet.
It is time our elected officials insisted that the sole provider of phone service and the 90% provider of data service in the county could at least spell the word “redundancy” let alone implement it for major cut points in service to the entire county!
Martin
Hey, OPALCO members know about the Wi-Fi service at ferry landings. What market are you trying to reach? Get that ugly banner down at Orcas landing. Why does a cooperative need a P.R. team and budget? One would think extra money would go toward lowering our power bills.