Disaster Planning

It appears that, after leaving a trail of disaster, Ike has finally run his course.

I won’t pretend to understand or appreciate the heartaches, trauma, and loss being suffered by people who got the brunt of the storm. In my own little corner of the world here in Bay Village OH we had sixty mile per hour winds come through on Sunday night blowing over trees and knocking out power and communications services througout the area. By some published accounts over 300,000 electric customers were without power.

What was not publicized was the number of subscribers who lost cable or other communications service.

Sunday night our lights flickered for a few minutes, but power stayed on. I thought we were home free until the lights went out Tuesday night and stayed off until about 5:30 AM. So, power-wise, we fared better than many.

Communications was another matter all together. In a previous blog I mentioned that I had transferred my telephone service from “ma bell” to Vonage Voice Over IP (VOIP), using my broadband cable connection.

Well, just as the Browns/Steelers game was beginning, the cable went out. Not only did we not have television, but lost Internet access (which is why no blogs for the past two days) and telephone service. Fortunately my cell phone service still worked and I had pre-arranged to have all Vonage calls automatically routed to my cell phone whenever an outage occurs.

Our cable service provider is Time Warner. Several times I called the Time Warner number to ascertain when service might be restored. The consistent response was that Time Warner service was interrupted throughout north east Ohio and western Pennsylvania due to POWER OUTAGES. In other words, the giant Time Warner (TW) company, which provides critical communications services to homes and businesses, was at the mercy of the power companies!

I find this situation deplorable! Apparently TW is not prepared for disasters. People with land lines had no wide spread interruption – I understand that all telephone exchange buildings have emergeny power. My cell phone was working no matter where in town I travelled the past two days, so the cellular folks apparantly have emergency power provisions.

Why would not TW be prepared for massive power failures as well?

Bay Village will soon be getting a competing cable company, WOW!. Other communities will also have the option of competing cable services. Perhaps a question we need to ask all cable companies before we sign the dotted line is what kind of emergeny preparedness they have.

Well, after two days of frustration over communications problems, it appears that TW has things back to normal. But, I should be grateful – as the folks in Galveston and Houston are really suffering in so many ways.

Will Limkemann
Limkemann Business Advisors
440-871-0976
www.neobizadvisor.com
will@limkemann.net