After storms and tornadoes ripped through West Michigan on May 15, which led to an unprecedented three-day city-wide internet and phone outage in Coldwater, Michigan, the Coldwater Board of Public Utilities in June unveiled its plan for additional redundancy.
The CBPU’s primary internet feed was taken out when a tornado took down six Consumer Energy poles in Battle Creek which had fiber attached.
The repairs on the fiber could not take place until the power lines were removed and the poles were replaced. The secondary feed was also affected by the storms that rolled through on the evening of May 16 which then left CBPU without any internet service. Restoration of services took place on May 19.
While many CBPU customers were grateful their power remained intact and understood that the internet outage was an inconvenience, others questioned the CBPU’s disaster recovery plan, the public power utility noted.
Along with both the primary and secondary feeds being affected, since some phones (including the city/CBPU’s) were voice-over-internet, the outage also left people without phone access. Furthermore, the City/CBPU’s website and customer text alerts were disabled since the server was inaccessible.
CBPU Director Paul Jakubczak, PE said, “Clearly, it was the perfect storm, yet if we want to look at the silver lining of this, all of these potential issues were already being evaluated within our disaster recovery plan. CBPU telecom staff was already looking into additional suppliers for internet redundancy, IT staff was already collecting information and quotes for a new phone system, and other staff was also researching companies for additional text alert systems. Unfortunately, doing our due diligence and implementing all of these pieces takes time.”
After board approval, the CBPU announced that it was ready to move forward with implementing Aspen Smart Networks as the primary internet feed provider.
