Humboldt County’s internet came roaring back to life late Tuesday night. Or, rather, that part of the Humboldt County internet based on AT&T came roaring back to life, as the rest of it never went down. For some reason, though, some corners of the county are still offline, including the airline check-in desk at the Humboldt County airport.
Emily Jacobs, Humboldt County’s airport program coordinator, confirmed to the Outpost this morning that the United check-in desk has been without connectivity since AT&T went dark early Monday morning, and remains without juice. They’re having a hell of a time trying to check people into their flights, according to Jacobs.
“They were told that the part of the infrastructure that needs to be repaired for their system to work won’t be repaired until Friday,” she said. No one at the had no more information about what infrastructure that might be.
Whatever the case: Jacobs says that if it’s at all possible, you should check in to your flight online, before you even get to the airport, if you want to help ensure a smooth boarding experience.
Other local businesses are still offline, too. Yesterday Coast Central Credit Union informed its customers that its network is still down.
Phone lines weren’t working at Coast Central this morning — because of the continued network outage, we assume — so we weren’t able to get hold of the credit union’s media people. Fortunately for customers, it seems like bank personnel are super-responsive to Facebook communications, even if they haven’t been able to get a status update from their network provider.
The Humboldt County Board of Supervisors ratified a declaration of emergency due to the telecommunications outage at its Tuesday meeting, so local government is taking a definite interest in the entirely preventable catastrophe that took individuals, businesses, medical facilities, first responders and others offline for nearly 48 hours at the beginning of the week — and evidently continue to disrupt business around the county.
Sean Quincey, a public information officer for the county, told the Outpost that he wasn’t sure if the county had yet asked for locals to quantify the damage caused by the outage, as it has in years past.
Here’s is the most recent statement from AT&T on its latest Humboldt County outage, which again fails to address the company’s failure to lease space for regular-level customers on the east-west fiber optic trunk line to the Central Valley, and which makes no mention at all of the fact that certain local businesses are still down, for some reason. It’s from AT&T regional media spokesperson Steven J. Ramirez:
We do our best to make as many improvements as possible and address the impact of natural disasters in an effort to avoid and/or minimize all outages.
Under normal circumstances our network in the North Coast has multiple routes along which we can reroute traffic. Unfortunately, with more than 15 fires across 8 counties damage to the area was severe. Despite these conditions, our teams worked around the clock to engineer a solution and replace the damaged cable.
In this case, having redundant a path directly helped us restore service much faster than we would have without redundancy. Even though this fire hit so many segments – we had sufficient redundancy to get service restored in 48 hours. Most service was restored from Willits to Eureka late last night.
###
PREVIOUSLY: