On Thursday, April 9th, I went through my morning routine, then
tried to check my email. I could not get through, so I tried to
call South Valley Internet to see what their system status was, and
got a busy signal. I decided they must be having technical
difficulties, so I went about my business and had a calm, quiet,
productive day.
On Thursday, April 9th, I went through my morning routine, then tried to check my email. I could not get through, so I tried to call South Valley Internet to see what their system status was, and got a busy signal. I decided they must be having technical difficulties, so I went about my business and had a calm, quiet, productive day.
Around three in the afternoon, I repeated the attempt with the same results. By now I was wondering vaguely whether my phone was working, so I placed a call to my friend across town, and got through. My friend was extremely glad to hear from me because, unlike me, she had been trying to connect with the outside world all day. She relayed to me the tale of her morning struggles and what she had finally learned in the afternoon on the radio: how saboteurs had cut fiber-optics cables, disrupting telephone, Verizon cell phone, internet, ATM, credit card, and 911 service to South County.
She was quite upset; I was quite blase; she became very urgent about telling me what a calamity it all was, how unprepared the authorities were, how something must be done. Her reaction surprised me, because my friend is generally level-headed. Her reaction reminded me of a scene from the last Die Hard movie, where hacker-terrorists disrupt the telecommunications system of the USA and seize the television system to convey a message intended to terrify, part of which reads, “What if you are hurt and alone and you dial 911 but nobody comes?”
I had always thought that the panic and hysteria portrayed in the movie was overdrawn. The tone in my friend’s voice as she urged me to realize the seriousness of the situation showed me that Hollywood had been right for once. Now I will grant that some people suffered greatly from the telecommunications outage. I know of one heart attack victim whose wife had to drive him to the hospital when 911 did not work. Since he did not have paramedic care on the ride, he is in worse shape than he would have been in had his attack happened a day earlier or a day later. Providentially, the FBI and area police did not report any serious crimes as of 6 p.m. Thursday, when service began coming back online. I was very pleased to read in Friday’s Dispatch of the steps taken by emergency services in South County during the outage.
Gilroy police alerted the commanders by the simple expedient of driving to their houses and talking to them face-to-face at 1:15 in the morning when the problem first surfaced. They communicated by radio and activated an Emergency Operations Center in the old police department. Police Chief Turner doubled street patrols and set up mobile stations throughout the city. Hospital employees likewise alerted on-call physicians and provided them with two-way radios.
Police, fire, and hospital kept in constant communication: they used their resources. I am cheered by the portrayal of some of my fellow citizens who likewise improvised, adapted and overcame, in particular how truck stop manager Keshab Bhattarai kept the big rigs rolling by allowing truckers to use his personal AT&T cell phone to call in their credit card purchases. The Dispatch resorted to shoe-leather reporting to get Friday’s issue out on time.
I am dismayed at the jitteriness and helplessness displayed by so many of my fellow citizens. Teenagers joked about experiencing text-withdrawal, and made excuses about not being able to do their assignments without internet connection. Young adults found themselves unable to work without their tech. Columnist Ben Anderson exemplifies this helplessness when he calls “upon the county and city leaders to better secure the data backbone that is so intertwined in our lives and survival.” This kind of over-reliance on government, this whining that the government has to do something to make sure our Blackberries work in the morning, is disgusting and frightening.
Our ancestors fled repressive governments in leaky tubs, crossed the prairies in covered wagons, shot buffalo with little sticks and bits of rawhide, escaped from slavery or helped others escape at the risk of their lives and property, and we come to a screeching halt because our phones don’t work for a day?Grow a spine.
