FCC Hurricane Michael after-action report

Wed May 15 02:30:40 UTC 2019

Can everyone on this list that is using Gmail please complain to Google as
there is a STUPID default to set font-size:small. It make the text unreadable
on smaller device with already small fonts.  The message I’m replying to
does this.  font-size:small should be verboten in email even for footnotes.

Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

<div dir=3D"ltr"><div class=3D"gmail_default" style=3D"font-size:small">The=
re's more to it than this too. I was down there (I have sites I'm r=
esponsible for in Panama City Beach) in February and I was talking to a bun=
ch of folks in the area as a result. This storm was fairly unusual for the =
area for a number of reasons. One, it normally doesn't hit the panhandl=
e at anywhere near a category 5, and two, it was still a high category 3 by=
 the time it hit Georgia. The amount of damage done was immense, is still n=
ot cleaned up (I drove past multiple buildings that were still piles of rub=
ble, 4 months after the storm), and I was seeing forests full of damaged an=
d destroyed trees all the way to I-10.</div><div class=3D"gmail_default" st=
yle=3D"font-size:small"><br></div><div class=3D"gmail_default" style=3D"fon=

> On 15 May 2019, at 1:38 am, George Metz <george.metz at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> There's more to it than this too. I was down there (I have sites I'm responsible for in Panama City Beach) in February and I was talking to a bunch of folks in the area as a result. This storm was fairly unusual for the area for a number of reasons. One, it normally doesn't hit the panhandle at anywhere near a category 5, and two, it was still a high category 3 by the time it hit Georgia. The amount of damage done was immense, is still not cleaned up (I drove past multiple buildings that were still piles of rubble, 4 months after the storm), and I was seeing forests full of damaged and destroyed trees all the way to I-10.
> 
> All in all, the vast majority of Panama City looked much more like 4 months after a tornado rather than a hurricane, and all that damage continued all the way into Georgia. Thinking this was just like any other hurricane to hit the area is the absolute wrong tack to take - from what I heard there was some discussion of whether it was worth it to reopen Tyndall AFB, because the only thing left standing was some WWII era bomb-proof concrete hangars.
> 
> On the flip side, improvements in response are a good thing - as long as people aren't beating up on the people who did the responding in the first place without cause.
> 
> On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 9:52 AM Rich Kulawiec <rsk at gsp.org> wrote:
> On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 11:48:02PM -0500, frnkblk at iname.com wrote:
> > One of my takeaways from that article was that burying fiber underground
> > could likely have avoided many/most of these fiber cuts, though I???m
> > not familiar enough with the terrain to know how feasible that is.
> 
> I suspect that may not be possible in (parts of) Florida.
> 
> However, even in places where it's possible, fiber installation is
> sometimes miserably executed.  Like my neighborhood.  A couple of
> years ago, Verizon decided to finally bring FIOS in.  They put in the
> appropriate calls to utility services, who dutifully marked all the
> existing power/cable/gas/etc. lines and then their contractors (or
> sub-sub-contractors) showed up.
> 
> The principle outcome of their efforts quickly became clear, as one
> Comcast cable line after another was severed.   Not a handful, not even
> dozens: well over a hundred.  They managed to cut mine in three places,
> which was truly impressive.  (Thanks for the extended outage, Verizon.)
> After this had gone on for a month, Comcast caught on and took the
> expedient route of just rolling a truck every morning.  They'd park at
> the end of the road and just wait for the service calls that they knew
> were coming.  Of course Comcast's lines were not the only victims of
> this incompetence and negligence.  Amusingly, sometimes Verizon had to
> send its own repair crews for their copper lines.
> 
> There's a lot more but let me skip to the end result.  After inflicting
> months of outages on everyone, after tearing up lots of lawns, after all
> of this, many of the fiber conduits that are allegedly underground: aren't.
> 
> ---rsk

-- 
Mark Andrews, ISC
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742              INTERNET: marka at isc.org