In the late night hours of Tuesday, January 17, a major snow storm descended on the Pacific Northwest. After record snowfall came down on Wednesday, an ice strom hit the region on Thursday. And then came the power outages.
While most folks were staying put, our PNW Field Ops team members were heading out as Clear service was impacted by the wintry blast. At least 30 sites were down at any given time.
Our fearless engineers braved the elements to physically deploy generators from the sites and then spent even more time in the cold troubleshooting and restoring service for our customers. Most of the site outages were caused by commercial power outages, which affected hundreds of thousands of homes.
And for those customers that were affected by the commercial power outages, they could at least brag to their friends via Facebook and Twitter that they still had internet service.
“I live in Sammamish and we didn’t have power for a total of 22 hours in a two day span,” CTO John Saw said. “But my Clear service was up and running the entire time, except for a brief period when the team had to roll out the gensets. Simply awesome.”
Word on the street was Dr. Saw’s house was the place to get connected, and the word spread quickly.
“The only small annoyance was that my son’s friends started coming over with their laptops,” Saw joked. “Thank goodness I don’t have to worry about overage fees.”
Trees and downed power lines, heavy snow and thick ice couldn’t stop our Field Ops team from getting the job done. They worked tirelessly from the early morning hours to night fall each day. It’s safe to assume the LA Times wasn’t referring to these guys when they called Seattleites ”wimps.”
The NOC team also kept very busy during the winter storm by monitoring the situation from Las Vegas and dispatching and coordinating the restoral efforts.
A very big THANK YOU to each person who helped keep our customers connected during Snowmageddon 2012. Individually and collectively, it was a job well done.
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