Puerto Rico just lost internet?

Fri Sep 22 05:25:49 UTC 2017

During the 1998 ice storm, Hydro Québec stated its infrastructure had
not been built to widthstand this once in 100 year event.  Reporters did
some research and the next day asked him if there was a trend in
increased freezing rain events. "I'll have to look into it".

The next day, the HQ CEO came back at the daily press conference to
confirm a gradual increase in last 20 years in freezing rain events, and
after looking at situation, HQ would change standards for its
infrastructure to widstand more frequent freezing rain events.

In Ontario, the govt passed new stronger standards for utility poles
which while granfathering existing ones, required the new standards
apply before you can add one more wire to a pole. This seemed innocusous
until telcos (Bell and smaller ones) started to want to add fibre to
poles, where, in many cases, poles had to be replaced at $30k a shot,
and original owner retained onwership of new pole paid by the telco.

During the same event, Bell Canada, whose disaster plans were
overwhelmed by the extent of power outages didn't have enough mobile
generators to keep every outdoor plant's batteries charged all the time.
As a result many areas suffered rolling POTS and cellular blackouts
until a truck could there there with a generator. Because of the extent
of the event, Bell couldn't bring spare generators from the next town
over because that town was also in short supply of generators.

When the nature of disruptive weather events changes (or become more
frequent), utilities needs to adapt by adding more resiliency to
physical infrastructure and being prepared with more spare hardware to
cope with the aftermath.

Hurricanes have the advantage of giving a few days warning and
predictions are becoming more accurate. In the case of Irma, utilises
have the time to pre-position trucks/equipment so they can kick in as
soon as winds/flooding go down.

In the case of Hydro Québec, their own statistics showed significant
long term increase in freezing rain events, so easy to justify spending
money to upgrade infrastrtucture.

In the case of recent hurricanes, it is still debatable whether those
were unusual events (since many towns had not experienced such striong
weather for over 50 years) or whetgher frequencty of such events was
going to increase.

This would affect how telcos plan how resilient their infrastructure
needs to be.