IDA was a wake up call for many people. Here in the southern portion of Louisiana, hurricanes are a way of life. Yup, there are a bunch of people that live in low lying areas that get flooded and they just refuse to evacuate when ordered to. Too bad for them. If they didn't leave, after they are told by the state, don't go looking for help until the winds die down.
I live about 45 miles north of New Orleans. Fortunately, the house here sits 168 feet above sea level, so I don't have to worry about high water. But we do get the winds and heavy rain. Was out of power for about 4 days. We do have a portable generator, so it wasn't that bad. But trying to get gas to fill the generator was a problem for a couple of days.
Plenty of trees down, many trees that took out the power lines and plenty of electrical poles. Not to mention the long sections of the TV cable systems around here. It took almost 3 weeks for the cable to come back to normal and have my Internet connection up with any reliability. The Internet kept going out as they were splicing the fiber cables and the normal coax cables the TV cable system uses.
We did have intermittent cell service for about a week. Verizon is the largest cell carrier around here and they were having problems getting some of their towers back up. They chose to rely on the local AT&T to supply the T1 data channels to some of the towers rather than microwave. That seems to have been a bad choice to the reliability of their system here.
The public safety radio system is via the state wide LWIN 700 MHz. trunking system. Due to the state's bad choice not to make a redundant microwave path into New Orleans and the trunking switch there, the LWIN system here in Saint Tammany Parish went down during the storm. It uses a microwave loop system here in Saint Tammany between all 8 of the tower sites. Then makes several hops back to Baton Rouge, where the main LWIN switch is located.
When the state wide trunking system was added to Saint Tammany Parish, the original plans was to have a second microwave path from the Parish. But this second link from the Slidell Police tower to the New Orleans East radio tower in New Orleans East was never installed. That microwave path was never installed for what ever reason. I still have not found out just who made that poor decision.
As Saint Tammany Parish is a bedroom community to many many people that work else where in the state, not only with the LWIN system going down here in the Parish, it effected all those people working else where in the state, as they left their radios on during their off time here in the Parish. It effected all those state employees working for the state like the State Police, The State Highway dept., the dept. of Corrections, all the State Wildlife Officers and the list goes on.
The state LWIN system is back to normal now. Thanks to many people that include the many power companies, the numerous telephone employees that got the cables back to gather and the hard working internet provider repair crews putting all the cables back into working order. They all deserve a good pat on their backs for the many hours and days it took from all of them.
People not from the Gulf Coast have no idea what happens before, during and after a storm around here. The roads can become impassable from power lines, telephone cables and trees that can totally block many of the roads. Even parts of the numerous Interstates that traverse through the southern portion of the state become impassible. It takes days to open up these so important means of transportation. Not only to relief workers, but the transportation of normal supplies like food and fuel.
Just thought some of you that don't live around here, might like to hear what we have to deal with after a major storm comes rolling through the area.
