North American Network Operators Group

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RE: Battery lifetimes RE: East Coast outage?

  • From: McBurnett, Jim
  • Date: Fri Aug 15 07:16:40 2003


>ut all those SONET hubs in basements, SLC's in the burbs and such
>-- they don't have generators. They have X hours of batteries. In
>the fine print, it says the LEC will have a portable generator
>on site before they die.

>That's doable if the failure is local; say a semi taking out
>a power pole. But given anything bigger, a citywide or bigger
>blackout, a regional ice storm, or whatever.... they do not have
>the quantity of gensets they'd need, much less the manpower to
>deploy AND maintain [refuel] same.

Here in the SE we had a little Experience with this EXACT issue
back in december.
We had a power outage that lasted 4 days.  Bellsouth's plan, and it
seemed to work, was to hook gensets to a truck run to a battery pack
run the generator long enough to recharge the pack and then drop 
and run to the next one. They started this within an hour or two
of the power outage.

None of my circuits went down during those days.
(We had generator power at our office)
This may be a larger, but we had about 2 Million out of power
in little ole SC..

IMHO,
J