Power's back

[johnridley]

and internet connection.
The wind was blowing like crazy last night. I don't really know but I'm betting we must have had 50 MPH winds. I woke up to peer out at it at some point and the clock was off. L tells me she happened to wake up just as it went off, she saw it was about 5AM then it went out. I just went back to sleep. Eventually, about 8AM I got up and called DTE - their automated system said first "be aware that our service area is experiencing widespread outages" - then after taking my report the system said they estimated 4 hours to restoration. I actually laughed - yeah, right.

So I went and dug the generator out and started it up.

The power finally came on about 8:20 I think. L came down from upstairs and said that some of the neighbor's lights were on again, I checked and the cable modem was fully lit again (that's how I tell if it's back) and I switched us back over. Figures. I'd just gone out and dumped a whole 5 gallon can of gas into the thing for overnight. The generator made it from about 9AM until about 7:45 on I think about 4 gallons of gas, running the whole house, including I was vacuuming and using the carpet cleaner for a couple of hours.

So the whole outage lasted about 15.5 hours as far as I can tell.

And the cable company continues to claim that their systems are fully battery backed, and they're therefore a great place to get phone services from. And yet, our internet connection drops instantly on power failures. Our neighbors who have their phone service say it dies pretty much immediately too (they haven't been trying to use it right when the power failed). Of course, so many people these days don't have anything but a cordless phone, they couldn't use a landline in a power failure anyway. Rule #1 of landlines - always have ONE corded phone that runs without power.

Comments

[scs-11.livejournal.com]

The forecast was for 50mph wind, so that's probably a good guess.

Our internet service (Charter), phone service, and electrical run completely independent outages. For a while I had the modem our homemade firewall/router on a UPS, and in desperate moments could log in on it's serial console even when there was no electricity and sometimes no phone.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Charter sometimes has outages on its own, but not that often. At our house, if the power is out, so is the internet service, even if our house is completely powered up. The cable modem just flashes its lights just as though the cable weren't connected.

I think the only time our phone service has been out was back when we had that outage that covered this whole quarter of the country and lasted for what, 3 days or so? Near the end of that the phone service went out.

[scs-11.livejournal.com]

We've had a couple of brief phone outages, but not in the last five years. Assuming you're talking about the winter power outage of two years ago, we never lost telephones during that.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

No, I'm talking about the outage that affected the entire northeast. Googling says Aug 14, 2003.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_North_America_blackout

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

While I doubt they'll do anything substantive about it, you may want to consider reporting the issue to the MPSC. As people trend to cableco's for their primary telco provider the onus of providing telecom services during emergency situations has to start falling on them.

This means that immediate outages when they lose power are unacceptable.