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The Orlando Sentinel got more than it asked for when it requested readers share their experiences with utility service outages in the wake of Hurricane Irma, which pounded Florida last week.
Readers reserved the most wrath for Charter Communications, which has evidently been less than forthcoming about service restoration.
“Give me something other than ‘we depend on somebody else and we have no idea about anything.’ […] That’s not an appropriate answer,” shared one Winter Park customer.
Charter’s spokespeople have blamed most of the outages on “the massive loss of commercial power that the state suffered.”
Customers seemed to buy that explanation until early this week, days after getting their power back.
“As I read their answer, it’s basically a lot of nothing,” opined the customer. “My experience with calling them is their answer is so vague [….] They could probably be a little more reassuring explaining ‘in this area the power comes from this place, and that place has an ETA of this, therefore some days later they expect this will be online.’”
“Our power was restored in the Crown Pt. Springs subdivision in Winter Garden on Monday afternoon, which we were very thankful for,” another reader said in an email. “I sure wish I could say the same thing about our Spectrum services (cable, internet and phone). As of right now, there is still no restoration.”
Still another: “Spectrum should be able to give their customers an estimated restoration time, like the power companies have. I haven’t seen one Spectrum truck in the Winter Garden or Ocoee area … not one!!! My husband drives a tractor-trailer for Coke and has seen one on the road this week. We are sick of them blaming the power companies for the reason that they can’t get into areas.”
While I typically do not like to defend a cable company, I am certain they just don’t have the manpower and equipment to repair damage this severe. I don’t think any cable company keeps a complete set of spares on hand to rebuild an entire system in one shot. The cable company isn’t going to keep dozens and dozens of crews and trucks on retainer, and have a plethora of replacement equipment sitting in a (dry) warehouse. The process involves determining what is broken, what CAN be fixed with personnel and equipment on hand, and what will have to wait… Read more »
I, too, don’t like to defend cable companies, especially Spectrum, but last winter we had a major power outage in our area when we had winds in excess of 70 MPH (and that was nothing compared to FL). While we had power, we didn’t have cable or, for me and my business, internet for a number of days. Spectrum was very vague in when they would have it done and said, to some extent, they were at the mercy of others. In the end, they were right. When the power was restored to the rest of our neighborhood, the cable… Read more »
That’s just damn sloppy engineering… There’s no excuse for them not having backup generators in junctions that serve large numbers of customers. They saved a few bucks, though.