It’s been very frustrating dealing with the utility companies with respect to restoring service in the post-Ike period. At issue is their inability to get and redistribute information about who’s on, who’s not, and routine progress reports. Today for a short while my focus turned to Comcast as our cable tv and cable modem service remains down.
Two linemen from BG&E had to get onto my property to restore the power lines to my neighbors garage apartment. While they were doing the work I took them some cold bottled water and chatted them up about their experience working on the post-Ike recovery here in Texas. They tell about what-you-would-expect in terms of a tale of chaos theory.
They were working restoring power for Entergy customers in another area last week. Come Sunday they were done and so wondering where they’d go next. Centerpoint didn’t get around to accepting their help until 11pm Sunday night, at which point they were instructed to gather at the Humble Civic Center parking lot Monday morning.
Utility power was restored at 4:15pm CDT today. Power went off at around 2am Saturday, Sept 13th. That means we were off-grid for 10 days and 12 hours.
For example: Ike has new verb context. To be "Iked" is to be left in the dark for a long time as the result of a de-regulatory process.
Now I still have a major issue with AT&T, and very much prefer to not give them my business. However, in The Woodland Heights neighborhood where I live we have now been without electricity and cable tv for 9 days. That in an of itself is bad but not entirely unexpected.
The unexpected part is that we have not seen ANY Centerpoint or Comcast branded vehicles in the area. Accepting that Centerpoint, the electrical distribution utility, is using help from utilities all over the state I can say that we have not seen any kind of electrical utility vehicles in the neighborhood, branded for whomever.
Well it has certainly been an unusual week around here. To start with migrating my domain to a new host took longer than I thought. The whole process took about a week. The thing is that it finally happened the very day that Hurricane Ike was to hit the Houston area. So…..I was a little busy…y’dig?
We had the house and office all boarded up and executed what the local authorities call “Shelter In Place.” That protocol, known as “SIP” to some outside the VoIP community was the recommended practice given our location.