John Tiblier:
I think every Uniti human within South Louisiana was affected by this. We had teams that were directly in the line of fire in the Houma-Thibodaux area and, of course, as it just moved on up. And obviously, it affected Tangipahoa Parish, that’s where Hammond is located and this is where one of our main offices and warehouses are located. So it absolutely affected everyone. Hammond has been one of our main focal points in storm recovery. And this office was absolutely open to families.
The first couple of nights, we had a lot of different folks in here with their children, their pets. We had grills and HQ was just continuing to send support to us, which we’re very thankful for. And all those amenities just help out as everybody just tries to get through it together.
This team is very well-seasoned. We immediately went into assessment, which we try to do as quickly and safely as possible. While at the same time, you have to get the core back up, the core backbone being interstate communications or CO to PoP, PoP to CO. You have to have that foundation in first, and then you start to work out to the other at levels.
Each area presents its own challenges. You see what people are going through. You see the human aspect of it. It’s difficult. You got to compartmentalize and you can’t really get caught up in what’s going on because you know you have a job to do. And the thing that you have to be cognitive of is that you’re out there restoring critical communications for our carrier customers. That means a lot to people to be able to obviously communicate and to tell their loved ones that they’re okay, call first responders if they’re in danger. But that’s what you really see.
You see the totality of the effect that it has on the community itself. And you see a lot of people helping one another, and it’s a miraculous thing. And through these types of disasters, there’s always some really good that does come out of it, as bad as it is. I’m super proud of everyone in the South LA, NOA. Everyone has come together, whether it be the Voice Team, the Natty Team working on the data center in Metairie to the NOC and the FOCAC have been tremendous in their support of our efforts here in our NOA, just the camaraderie, I think, that we’ve all developed by having gone through this.
Long-term, the blessing that this kind of provides us. It allows us to look at our networks vulnerability points to learn how to make it better and future-proof this for many years to come.
So at this point we’re day 11 into restoration and we are somewhere around 80%, 85%, now if I had to guess. With hundreds of outages, well over a thousand and what this team has done to make that happen and to bring those numbers in like that is absolutely incredible and it reflects great credit upon themselves and their character as well as the company.The last 20% is always the hardest to get, but I’m confident this team will continue to chop wood and be successful.
On behalf of everyone in the NOA. We can’t thank Uniti enough for all the support that they’ve given us. Every day, we had folks asking us if there was anything that we needed and it’s just been tremendous, the effort that’s been put into sustaining operations here to accomplish this mission. Ida may have us down, but she’s definitely not going to break us.
