Local Internet Provider Impacted By Storms

Photo taken by: Stephene Tune

Columbia, CA – This week’s winter storms knocked out several towers needed to provide internet service to customers, and today Conifer Communications is apologizing to its customers in a letter.

It was a “perfect storm” for the internet company, as deep snow, downed trees and power lines took out Conifer towers and, in turn, service. Three of the towers were also hit by lightning on Monday. Company spokeswoman, Sonja Harris Langan, tells Clarke Broadcasting that progress has been made. She detailed that thousands of customers lost their internet service earlier in the week, and crews have managed to drop that number to just over a hundred today.

The company hopes to have most of the customers’ service restored by this weekend, with the exception of the Copperopolis tower. Harris Langan explained, It was one of the three hit by lightning and also has eight feet of snow around it, blocking crew access. It will not be fixed until Monday afternoon. Today, the company issued this letter apologizing to customers:

Dearest customers,

You have our sincerest apologies for the recent outages that you have experienced with your service and for the silence that you may have experienced from us if you are not able to follow our Facebook updates.

Please know none of this has been intentional or excusable.

Here is what has happened so far, and how we are working to fix it:

On Monday, February 27th the storm took out primary power (PGE) to many of our sites, causing said sites to fall back on battery, solar, or generator backup. The afternoon of the 27th, lightning strikes unfortunately took out three of our key towers within a short period of time.

When the storm subsided we were able to access some of our sites remotely but were not able to physically access many key sites due to deep snowfall—despite our teams’ efforts hiking, snowshoeing, snowmobiling, etc…

Early Tuesday 28th, a collapsed tree took down our upstream fiber connection (which is still down as of now, March 3rd 2023). Unfortunately, our backup connection to our servers was one of the inaccessible towers that was affected by the lightning strikes—This took out our key servers which control the system and house our email and phone systems, which meant until it was repaired we had no way of communicating with you beyond social media (Facebook). This also meant that our customers could not leave us voicemails until repaired.

We spent the rest of Tuesday and Wednesday battling the storm, trying to hike in multiple feet of snow and clear downed trees to get to tower sites as well as rescue stranded company vehicles and dig out buried equipment. Those days exhausted us with as many steps back as forward.

On Thursday, with the aid of the sunshine, we made it to many of the towers and were able to build a new back-up connection to our servers, which are currently being powered by generators. This day also saw our teams helping our greater community by helping to rescue a snowbound woman in need of medical aid. We are thankful to have been in the right place at the right time. Thursday night we continued to repair lightning fried components to keep the servers connected.

This morning (Friday 3/3) we were able to get the generator refilled at the backup connection tower and get the system back up. We will be continuing to do repairs on down sites today and all through this weekend of storms, as well as return calls to you.

How we are moving forward from here:

Our first goal is to get every home and business back online. Following this we will be working on providing credits and the like. While this storm is an act of God and we are not legally required to pay for down service, we be doing so in order to help make this right by our own standards. We will be looking to provide down-time credits for every active customer, however at this time we request that you only call us if there is a service issue that needs our attention to fix. We will be handling credits and billing issues after our network and customer homes and businesses are repaired.

Lastly, we will be putting in triple redundancy on our servers so we are never fully out of communications with you. This step will take some time, but it is a key priority for our leadership. We are sure that there is some information that we may have forgotten to include. We will be posting and/or emailing updates as is needed.

Sincerely,

-The Conifer Crew