When Hurricane Rita ripped through SE Texas in 2005 and took out all utilities for about 3 weeks, I got my first taste of life in an area of a city that's apparently last on any service restoration list. I was living in Beaumont at the time, and all of my services were restored within 3 weeks. Eric, who lives in Orange, a city of about 20,000 that's about 25 miles east of Beaumont on the Louisiana border, had to camp out at my home in Beaumont because it took between 2 weeks to 2 months longer to restore his major utilities (electricity, phone, and cable) to his neighborhood in Orange. His home is in a middle class neighborhood right off the freeway and well inside the city limits, so I found it quite surprising that it took so long to restore utilities. I later discovered that the restoration timetable in this neighborhood was on par with those neighborhoods way out in the country. Go figure.
In the last week, the nightmare of utility outages in the fair city of Orange has struck again. The entire city was without electricity for much of last Thursday when there was a fire at a transformer station. The entire day was pretty much shot for business. Then, on Friday, a construction crew cut through a major telephone artery and left much of the city without phone and Internet service. Upon reporting the outage, I discovered that the estimated repair time was one week. I thought, "You've got to be kidding!"
Fortunately (and this is the first time I have used this word in this situation), I live in a neighborhood in which DSL isn't offered, so I was forced to buy broadband service from the cable company. Eric already had some very poor quality DSL service at the house when I moved in, but the quality is such that the phone company refuses to sell the service in this neighborhood any longer. Initially we tried sharing his connection, but his online gaming activities slow the service down to a crawl, which made it impossible for me to run my business online. Therefore, I had to buy a second broadband service for my business. And, the phone company also doesn't offer basic voicemail service here, so I was forced to get my phone service through Vonage to get access to the voicemail services I have used for years in my business.
Consequently, I was able to stay in business this week. Had I not had the cable service, I guess I would have taken a week of forced vacation, or camped out a friend's house or hotel room in Beaumont. I maintain a basic landline phone (that I rarely use) as my "hurricane" phone because during Hurricane Rita, the phone service was restored much faster than the cable service. Now, it looks as though I need backup broadband service, as well. We have that, although it wasn't planned, and there aren't any options in this area to work remotely, i.e. a Starbucks with wireless Internet access. Since the recent outages have affected the entire city, a remote location probably wouldn't have service, either.
How redundant do your systems
have to be to w*rk at h*me? Since this city has, hands down, offered the
greatest number of challenges with utility connections, perhaps it's time to
relocate to civilization..
BTW, the we finally got phone service back on Tuesday night, 2 days short of the week-long repair estimate..;->
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