MAJOR FIBER CUT

Our Upstream feed from FirstLight is down. The FirstLight NOC is currently trying to locate a fiber cut. As soon as we know more, we will post here, and on the Voice Status Line (802) 382-8700.

Power outage

Most of a foot of wet and heavy snow from the early season storm of the last two days resulted in a four hour grid power outage in Ripton this evening--from around 3:11pm to 7:11pm. Major network nodes and most customers were unaffected, but limited battery life at the Heppell and Flinner barn relays meant downstream customers in the village center and Bread Loaf areas were out for the last hour or more of that period.

Wet n' Wild Windstorm

We survived yesterday's windstorm with little damage. There were a few brief outages at more remote sites owing to power interruptions at minor relay points, but the only significant problem occured shortly before Noon  at the Pearl Lee location. Cabling to the tree-mounted 900 AP there was whipped and torn by the gale force winds, resulting in an outage for three customers near the intersection of North Branch Road, the Lincoln Road, and Pearl Lee Rd. Weather and parts logistics kept us from restoring service until about 1:20pm today.

LIGHTNING DAMAGE

We lost a power distribution unit supplying almost all infrastructure at the Hanson tower location early this morning. It failed at about 6:50am, almost certainly because of cumulative  damage from yesterday and last night's rounds of severe thunderstorms. The fact that it took down multiple network devices simultaneously-including our primary Ripton backhaul link- foiled normal alerting and slowed diagnosis. We were able to retrieve and configure a backup PDU and restore service to most Ripton customers at approximately 11:45am. A single AP failed to come back up, and it was close to 1:00pm before the final handful services was restored. We apologize for the outage and thank our customers for their understanding.

BACK UP!

With the restoration of grid power at 11:49am, all nodes came back up immediately, and all customers appear to be logging in successfully. We will be calibrating our runtime on batteries at the Old Town Road location when this month's round of upgrades is complete, make sure that we have 24 hours minimum, and put a plan in place for providing temporary generation for more prolonged grid outages. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

STORM UPDATE/RIPTON DOWN 

As of 9:00 this morning the entire Ripton network is down. Battery backup power at the Old Town Road relay was exhausted overnight. Ironically, doubling the battery backup capacity there is imminent as that location is now carrying the significantly greater electrical load of a radio relay for the Fire Department's emergency services communications--in fact the new battery cabinet was shipped on Friday, two days ago.
Service will be restored as soon as Green Mountain Power restores grid power. They are now predicting restoral at 11:55am.

STORM REPORT

The network seems to have survived this afternoon's violent storm without serious incident. At this time (6:09pm) it appears that the minor network nodes at Old Town Road, Brooks (near Breadloaf), and Selden Mill Road remain without power after exhausting their battery backups. We are inspecting those sites to verify and hoping for restoration of grid power as soon as possible.