WhyADuck
Premium
join:2003-03-05
2 edits | reply to Marilla
Re: No surprises
He's not talking about CO's, he's talking about remote terminals (well, actually he wasn't - a previous post was) - basically, the point at which a fiber optic feed from the central office is broken out into copper pairs to serve a small community or a neighborhood. These remote terminals are powered by commercial power and usually have backup batteries, but not generators (if they really need to they can hook up a portable generator, but they don't really have enough of those to go around in a major outage).
We have one of these in our neighborhood and a few years ago we had a prolonged power outage. The phones did stay up during the outage, but the next night the whole village lost phone service. Turned out that whatever caused the power outage (and I really don't remember at this point) not only tripped a circuit breaker inside the remote terminal, preventing the commercial power from being re-applied, but also damaged the charging circuit, so after a day or so the batteries were completely run down and everyone lost dial tone. So, because it was close to getting dark, the phone company guys drove a few miles to another remote terminal, swiped the charging circuity out of it, and installed it in the remote terminal with the dead batteries. They then left the whole mess for the daytime crew to clean up the next day. Anyway I'd say were were without service for around six to eight hours, and somehow we all survived.
Interestingly, there was one pay phone in the village (that I know of) that still worked, presumably because they had left that on one of the original copper pairs coming direct from the C.O. It got a lot of use that night as everyone was coming to call repair service - at one point when we had repair on the line, we were just handing off the phone from one person to the next, so that each in turn could report their specific outage (since we did not at that point know what the problem was). |
