— from Aaron Wasser —
UPDATE: FULL UTC REPORT AVAILABLE HERE
Sen. Kevin Ranker, D-Orcas Island, issued the statement below regarding the release of a staff report conducted by the Utilities and Transportation Commission and the staff recommendation that CenturyLink pay $170,000 in fines stemming from a 10-day service blackout to the San Juan Islands in Nov. 2013.
The full UTC press release can be viewed here.
“I’m very pleased with the strength of the UTC staff’s recommendations to what was a serious 10-day crisis on the San Juan Islands last November.
“Not only were the islands cut off from the rest of the world, first responders reported two significant medical incidents during the outage in which two elderly residents tried unsuccessfully to call for help.
“UTC staff found serious deficiencies both in CenturyLink’s response and their communication with the public. Hopefully today’s ruling will help ensure that stronger protections are created to prevent this from happening again.
“I’d also like to give credit to CenturyLink which did step up to credit customers impacted by the outage.
“Those were a trying 10 days for so many people last November. My hope is that today’s ruling will help make sure this never happens again.”
“I’d also like to give credit to CenturyLink which did step up to credit customers impacted by the outage.” Really? Are you serious? You make it sound like CenturyLink did us all a favor. They gave us credit because they billed us, and we paid for, a service they did not provide. I’m not an attorney but I believe charging for services not rendered is fraud. They HAD to give us credit. They were so generous they made sure it was for no more than we were entitled to in their minds and the way they listed it on our bills left me wondering if I really got a complete refund for all services I did not receive. Just a generic credit for “Out of Service” with little amounts listed on 3 or 4 different pages of my bill without any explanation as to how they came to that amount. And no one I’ve talked to received the same amount even though we have close to the same service with a few minor differences. When a company fails to deliver and that failure is as catastrophic as it was to our community I expect more from them. When a cruise ship fails to deliver they also give credit for future cruises on top of a refund for that cruise and all that happened was peoples vacations were ruined. CenturyLinks failure possibly costed lives. Businesses couldn’t operate and owners lost money and employees couldn’t work and received no paycheck. And all this right before the holidays.
Way to “step up”.
Just another one of Rankers gratuitous public relation sops to the masses.
Gotta agree with Darleen on this one. $170k barely scratches the surface and does not provide the incentive for Centurytel to keep this from happening again.
Sorry Kevin, but you must have been out if the county when the outage happened because had you been here there is no way you would consider this fine and the actions of Centurytel as anything but “strong”.
What we should be discussing is the revocation of Centurytels license to operate in San Juan County and absent that, some mandatory investments in infrastructure to assure that this never happens again.
You are correct. Even OPALCO cant guarantee that this will never happen again, for any amount of money. Of course they would like us to believe so. Personally I do not wish to finance their and other’s fantasy by way of my electric bill. We live on islands. Deal with it.
Seriously?!! Never happen again?!! Having lived in many different states and used many different phone companies, I attest that Centurylink is the WORST phone service company I have EVER encountered. The fact that they are the ONLY phone company is tantamount to being hostage to their inefficiency, exorbitant charges, and impersonal, uncaring, customer relations. I cannot adequately express my loathing for this company nor my disgust at Kevin Ranker’s statement. Darleen is 100% right and Kevin Ranker, you’ve got to do better than that! Try to remember that your constituency is not composed of eight year olds!
I agree with all of the responses above. As I opened my
statement after the inconvenience of 10 days without service and saw my very small credits, Peggy Lee’s song “Is that all there Is,” came to mind. Kevin Ranker appears to be
out of touch with his constituents on the Island and or playing the game with centurylink. I’m looking for another peovider.
Let’s rechannel our negative experiences with Centurylink into positive support for OPALCO. And, bring fast communications to our community.
Would like to add my support of, and 100% agreement with Elane Phipps’ comment. I am looking for an alternative to Centurylink as well. Would love to know what you discover.