Puerto Rico: Lack of electricity threatens telephone and internet services

Thu Oct 19 22:11:37 UTC 2017

It does make you wonder about the electrical infrastructure of the island,
and how much work is being done to repair it. With the Texas and Florida
hurricanes you saw fleets of electrical service vehicles (boom trucks and
the like) from other power companies with joint agreements waiting to
deploy into the disaster area as soon as it was safe to do so.

With PR.... well, it's not like you can drive to the island, much less
(apparently) around on it. Getting those vehicles and people in, assuming
joint agreements with off island power companies existed in the first
place, would be a case of scheduling and determining priorities.

And for those crying that the US Federal Gov't ought to do it - where do
you think they're going to find the people? It's not like they have armies
of infrastructure level electricians just sitting around playing cards
until needed for an emergency - these are the sort of people who, by and
large, are already working at jobs - where they are needed as well.

When it comes to infrastructure it seems like PR has been knocked back to
the "tools to make tools" stage - they need to build the infrastructure to
rebuild their infrastructure, which was apparently in no great shape to
begin with.

On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 12:06 PM, Jean-Francois Mezei <
jfmezei_nanog at vaxination.ca> wrote:

> On 2017-10-19 03:00, Sean Donelan wrote:
>
> > not intended for long-term, continuous use.  The generators will need
> > maintenance and likely experience unscheduled failures the longer they're
> > used.
>
> Permanent duty diesel generators exist.  Many northern communities in
> Canada run on them as their 7/24 power source.
>
> It *shouldn't* have taken long after Maria for locals to know how much
> damage there had been to electrical grid and that if it's gonna take
> months to fix, you're gonna need constant duty generators.
>
> What isn't clear to me is whether everything still depends on FEMA/army
> help, or whether business is able to function autonomously and get their
> own generators without the army confiscating them to be delieved to a
> hospital instead.
>
> And if you're a telco who is deprived of revenues because almost all
> your customers are without power, do you spend your own money and effort
> to try to get a permanent duty diesel generator to maintain your central
> office, or do you wait for government to install one for you ?
>
> It is one thing to be benevolent and wanting to have your network
> backbone up, but financial realities of the cost of running a business
> without revenues will eventually hit you when the disaster lasts for
> months instead of days.
>

-- 
Jeff Shultz
Central Office Technician
SCTC
(503) 769-2125
Go Big  Ask for Gig

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