Storms

[Tonyrotary]

  Well not quite a few weeks ago, we had a little squall, aww heck a big squall come through. The wind picked up, the sky turned black and the rain came. Then the wind got stronger and stronger. I really thought a tornado was coming as the trees were really getting whipped around. The power flickered a few times then the storm passed. Couldn't have lasted more than ten minutes.  I went out the back of the house to see if any tree branches fell. Yep some small ones here and there. Then looked to the side of the house and found a large branch the size of a small tree fell, coming down on the power line to the house, snapping the utility pole down. This pole is basically just used to hold the wire up as the distance form the main pole and the house is kinda far. The meter got pulled from the house but wires were still attached and we still had power. Never heard the sound over the noise of the wind.

  Right then I told my wife to call the electric company. Although we had a landline to the house, we don't have service as we use our cell phones. I wanted service soon so I can hook up my rotary phones again. In this case though good thing we had cell phones as the phone line was ripped off the house too and not connected at all. I usually said in a storm you would want a landline just in case, but this time the cell phone won. I guess our landlines aren't as immune to mother nature as we would believe them to be. At least not in the country Had our electric back up by nightfall, but the landline alas is still down. We are gonna have to call AT&T for that.

[jsowers]

One thing that could have avoided a problem like you had was to have your utilities buried. I live in the country and my house is 30 years old this year. For whatever reason, they buried the electric, phone and cable TV lines in the ground from the road to the back of the house when it was built. I don't live far off the road. I have lots of trees in the front and side yards, so the buried utilities have probably saved me lots of trouble. My parents and grandparents next door have above-ground wiring and it's been out of service several times because of large tree limbs falling in storms very similar to what you described. We're lucky never to have the meter pulled from the wall, but it's snapped the electric, phone and cable lines in two more than once.

One reason I keep an analog phone line is because I don't own a cell phone and my mom is elderly and has service through the cable company and has no phone service when the power is out. I've had to call for repair when she's had broken lines several times. When you get the new phone line installed from AT&T, ask them if they can install it underground.

[Tonyrotary]

Having the utilities buried would have saves us the headache. But the house was built by my wife's grandfather and I don't think there was an option then. The good news is we needed to upgrade our electrical panel outside anyways and we did and had the insurance cover some of the cost. So I look at it as I got a good discount lol! I might ask AT&T about burying the their line.

[TelePlay]

IIRC, when trenching in lines to cell towers, we put it all in together even if the service wasn't available at that point in time. Laying it all at once in the same trench saved a lot of money over doing each one at a time or retrenching to add something later. IIRC, they buried 220 VAC, 50 pair to cover 7 or 8 T2 lines and fiber optic before it was in the area. Some lines from road to tower base were close to a half mile to a  mile long. If you are going to bury something, ask them if they can and will do all at once to save money. My memory goes back to about 2001 so it may be different today.

[19and41]

The last bad weather takedown in our area were the southeast winter storms 0f 2012.  In our case, the landline remained but the power went out, taking the cell service with it.  My home phone is 4G Wimax and it and my cell went out.  The only remaining way I had to call out was to use the phone patch feature on my work 2-way handheld radio.  Now that my Wimax service is expected to end in November, I'm at a loss to work out a replacement, as I've had too many bad experiences with AT&T.

[andre_janew]

I think new phones lines are automatically buried anyway.  I say that because here in Lawrence, Kansas where I live they are buried.  Overhead phone lines are a thing of the past.

[savageje]

I live in a relatively new subdivision (circa 1995), and we're lucky -- everything is buried.  That still doesn't protect us from a break in aerial lines along the main roads, but we really haven't had too many weather-related problems.   I switched my landline service over to cable a couple of years back.  My cable provider uses Arris modems that have a built-in battery backup if you buy phone service from them.  (Although for some reason, they don't provide the batteries themselves -- customers have to buy them on their own.)  With the internal battery backup and the modem's line power plugged into a desktop UPS, I've been able to keep phone service through an outage of several hours.  The only downside to my setup is that with a relatively recent software update, my cable modem stopped supporting pulse dialing -- so I have to use a pulse-to-tone converter at the modem to allow my rotary phones to continue to work throughout the house.

[NorthernElectric]

In my neck of the woods, burying copper wires does not protect them from lightning, and in fact it might make them more likely to get hit by electrical charges traveling some distance in the ground from the sight of a lightning strike.  This may be due to the geology of the region; the Canadian Shield.  Soils where present, are relatively thin and the bedrock is usually not far from the surface.  I've never seen any studies of this phenomenon, but it's well known around here.

I'm a network administrator and we had a couple of runs of CAT5 ethernet cable buried in conduit servicing 2 out buildings.  We would frequently have equipment damaged during electrical storms even though there was no evidence of a lightning strike in the immediate vicinity.  I installed ethernet surge protectors but didn't trust their ability to block lightning, so I optically isolated the outdoor LAN cables.  I used 2 ethernet/fiber media converters back to back with a short fiber patch cable at each end of the outdoor cable runs.  The media converters connected to either end of the underground cable segments were sacrificial and I had maintained a stock of spares to replace them.  The surge protectors helped them to last longer but did not protect them completely.  This scheme put an end to lightning damage, sacrificial media converters excepted, until we eventually installed fiber optics to service the out buildings.

[CanadianGuy]

Our incumbent phone company (who I'm a contractor for) has it set up so that if you have TV or high speed through them, but no landline, the line still has dial tone. Of course it's partly used for line identification for the naked dsl (what they call delinked here) but it also works for 911. Not sure if that is a CRTC requirement or what, being the incumbent, but great nonetheless. Mind you, not many people who don't have landline don't have a phonr lying around to plug in. Plus some installers don't bother hooking up the jacks anyway.