by James Wallace Harris, 8/6/23
I’m writing this on my iPhone by typing with just my right index finger because our internet is still out. It’s been over a week now. We feel like we’re living in the 1980s. We know this is a first-world problem and nothing compared to all the natural catastrophes happening around the world. Still, it’s quite educational.
When AT&T came out to fix our internet, we discovered the wire from the pole to the house was on the ground hidden in some bushes. It had been pulled off the pole and the connection at the house by a falling tree limb. The repair guy said it would be no problem stringing a new wire, but I, unfortunately, knew better.
“You can’t climb that pole,” I said to the repairman as he started walking to the back of my lot.
“What,” he said.
“That pole is so rotten and broken that MLG&W guys won’t climb it. The linemen won’t work on it without a bucket truck.”
The AT&T guy tried to use a distant pole but there were no free circuits. So now we’re waiting for AT&T to return with a bucket truck.
We’ve been waiting years for that telephone pole to be replaced. Our block is bisected by power lines on incredibly old poles. They are hollow, with big cracks, and holes. The power company tagged them years ago to be replaced but they spend all their time fixing lines and circuits that are broken. This summer Memphis has had several storms causing several big outages, including over 100,000 customers.
It’s a matter of aging infrastructure. Memphis is built under a sea of trees, and those trees are always falling. It’s an endless battle between the arboreal world and power lines. In the winter, ice storms make a siege on the trees and water pipes and sewers. During the rest of the year, frequent storms rattle millions of limbs. And the extremes of hot and cold wear on everything all the time.
That line of old telephone poles that divides the block is shrouded by trees in backyards segregated by fences of all types. Those poles won’t be easy to replace. And they won’t be replaced until they fall. Which means days of power outages for about seventy homes in this area. I live with the fear of one old dead tree in particular, falling across the powerlines and bringing the whole line of telephone poles down in my backyard.
Last year we had a freeze that damaged many water lines, and the city was under a boil water alert. Many people in Germantown can’t drink their water right now because gasoline got into a leaky old pipe.
I expect from now on as the weather gets more violent and as our infrastructure ages, we’ll all live with increased outages. If you are paying attention to the news, cities all over the world are living with scheduled blackouts and water shortages. The recent floods in China are a terrifying portent of things to come.
Living without the internet is a lesson about the future. Things are going to break down more. We all need to become preppers. As we build new infrastructure and repair the old, we need to design new structures that can withstand far greater abuse from Mother Nature.
I wish 5G internet was available in our neighborhood. Then we wouldn’t need wires. Unfortunately, we only get one bar of broadband in this neighborhood. And I wonder if they could route the power lines under the streets. I know they bring fiber optic cables to old neighborhoods that way.
I believe there will be plenty of solutions to these aging infrastructure problems, but we might have to go through decades of bumpy readjustments.
JWH
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