Although the media coverage of Hurricane Irene was awful, I have to give credit where credit is due. We did end up having a power outage. We were lucky. It occurred right around 4am and lasted until 9:30am so its impact on our daily routines and power use was minimal. Between 9:30 and noon, everything was working great–and then the cable went out. With the cable, went our Internet connection and our home phone line. All of that was finally restored around 7pm.
We have Dominion Power as our electric company. I was following them on Twitter (I could stil get Internet access over 3G and we’d charged our phones and other devices over night so there was no problem using those devices during the power outage and Internet outage) and Dominion’s twitter account was making frequent and informative updates on their progress at restoring power. There were close to a million customers without power, but in our area, Dominion restored service quickly and I made sure to tweet them a thank you for their quick work.
Cox Communications is by far the best cable company I’ve ever had. Next to them, Comcast/Xfinity looks like some kind of evil dictatorship regime. They aren’t even close to being in the same league. Cox is particularly good when it comes to customer service, something almost unheard of in the cable company world. They were making frequent, regular updates to their Facebook page. I called once to report my outage and their computerized system already recognized that there was an outage in my area and they were working to resolve the problem. I tried not to sweat it, and indeed, when I flipped on the TV at around 7pm just to see if the cable was back, I was surprised to find that it was!
Both companies deserve props for their quick response to the storm and both companies did a good job in my book.
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