We had seen extremely low (sub zero temperatures) earlier that week cause our equipment to stop working at this site, however the temperature was not that cold. We waited for some of the extreme high wind, blowing snow and other adverse weather to pass and the service to Mt Fanny to restore. Service did not restore by Sunday evening. We tried some adjustments to the La Grande end, but no real improvement was realized. We can receive a signal and can occasionally for very brief moments communicate with the Mt Fanny site but the signal is not strong enough to carry regular traffic. Signal quality has continued to go down as days have passed. We replaced our equipment on the La Grande end of the link to Mt Fanny and checked alignment, no change. So we conferred with some other wireless Internet Service Providers (ISP) we know and the mostly likely cause for the outage was thought to be ice build-up on our antenna at Mt Fanny. This makes some sense due to the increase in precipitation we have had this year over last year (this EONI Mt Fanny site was established in August 2006). Further our Mt Harris site has not experienced degraded signal to this degree, however the antenna are smaller and there is more shielding from surrounding trees. The Mt Fanny site is much more exposed.
Generally we have not blogged about problems as we did not want to air this laundry for the world, speak of internal processes, expose trade-secrets, etc, however we feel being open, honest and direct will help our customers to understand the situation directly. We also responded to a request from the local newspaper The Observer on Tuesday and Mardi Ford wrote an article which appeared in last night's edition.
This morning we met up with Al and Emmett from Oregon Public Broadcasting's La Grande Engineering group. We planned to follow them up to Cove and then ride in the snowcat with them to the Mt Fanny site where they planned to conduct regular maintenance activities. However the day began with schools throughout the valley not starting as blowing snow reduced visibility and caused dangerous snow drifting conditions. Undaunted, we headed out at 830AM while we listened to ODOT radio dispatch speaking lots of problem spots throughout the area with wrecks, closed roads, etc. The road from Island City to Cove was closed. We headed to Union at about 35 MPH and found the road from Cove to Union closed as well. We waited for about 30 minutes in Union to see if the road would open. ODOT said that one of the two lanes was barely open and the snow drifts were higher than the top of the snowcat (which was sitting atop a 3 foot trailer). ODOT thought we might get in to Cove but might not be able to get back out when we were finished. ODOT was very busy today and with some equipment not working they had their hands more than full. So we headed for home and Al from OPB called us up and we plan to try again tomorrow morning. As weather conditions change rapidly we will not know until tomorrow if we can get up to Mt Fanny.
We truly understand that this is a real problem for our customers. We encourage you to keep a backup land line in place and contact our office to get a free backup dialup account to use until the service is functioning normally.
Please, stay tuned for more updates.
Pictures from today are here.
Sorry I did not take pictures of the road closure blockades.