There's more to it than this too. I was down there (I have sites I'm responsible for in Panama City Beach) in February and I was talking to a bunch of folks in the area as a result. This storm was fairly unusual for the area for a number of reasons. One, it normally doesn't hit the panhandle at anywhere near a category 5, and two, it was still a high category 3 by the time it hit Georgia. The amount of damage done was immense, is still not cleaned up (I drove past multiple buildings that were still piles of rubble, 4 months after the storm), and I was seeing forests full of damaged and destroyed trees all the way to I-10.
All in all, the vast majority of Panama City looked much more like 4 months after a tornado rather than a hurricane, and all that damage continued all the way into Georgia. Thinking this was just like any other hurricane to hit the area is the absolute wrong tack to take - from what I heard there was some discussion of whether it was worth it to reopen Tyndall AFB, because the only thing left standing was some WWII era bomb-proof concrete hangars. On the flip side, improvements in response are a good thing - as long as people aren't beating up on the people who did the responding in the first place without cause. On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 9:52 AM Rich Kulawiec <r...@gsp.org> wrote: > On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 11:48:02PM -0500, frnk...@iname.com wrote: > > One of my takeaways from that article was that burying fiber underground > > could likely have avoided many/most of these fiber cuts, though I???m > > not familiar enough with the terrain to know how feasible that is. > > I suspect that may not be possible in (parts of) Florida. > > However, even in places where it's possible, fiber installation is > sometimes miserably executed. Like my neighborhood. A couple of > years ago, Verizon decided to finally bring FIOS in. They put in the > appropriate calls to utility services, who dutifully marked all the > existing power/cable/gas/etc. lines and then their contractors (or > sub-sub-contractors) showed up. > > The principle outcome of their efforts quickly became clear, as one > Comcast cable line after another was severed. Not a handful, not even > dozens: well over a hundred. They managed to cut mine in three places, > which was truly impressive. (Thanks for the extended outage, Verizon.) > After this had gone on for a month, Comcast caught on and took the > expedient route of just rolling a truck every morning. They'd park at > the end of the road and just wait for the service calls that they knew > were coming. Of course Comcast's lines were not the only victims of > this incompetence and negligence. Amusingly, sometimes Verizon had to > send its own repair crews for their copper lines. > > There's a lot more but let me skip to the end result. After inflicting > months of outages on everyone, after tearing up lots of lawns, after all > of this, many of the fiber conduits that are allegedly underground: aren't. > > ---rsk >