What would happen if Cook County were suddenly cut off from communication with the rest of the world? What if no one could make a long distance phone call, send or receive email, or even get his or her cell phone to work? About mid-morning Tuesday, January 26, 2010, the county found out. A communications outage, rumored to have been caused by a fiber optic cable that was melted by road steaming to clear ice from a road in downtown Duluth, shut down Internet, cell phone and long distance services in three counties.
If you called 911, you would have heard a busy signal. Even calls between telephone prefixes within the county would not go through – 387 could not contact 475; 663 could not contact 388. What if someone arrived at the hospital emergency room needing a helicopter ride to Duluth?
According to Dr. Sandy Stover of the North Shore Hospital and Sawtooth Mountain Clinic, the county’s emergency management system clicked into gear quickly and efficiently. Local ham radio operators dropped whatever they were doing and headed to places like the hospital, where they could relay messages that needed to be sent outside the county.
The scanner was busy with law enforcement trying to stay in touch.
Some places, such as the Sawtooth Mountain Clinic, slowed down. Dr. Stover said they could not access patient charts since their server is in Duluth. Theyhad to rely on the information patients gave them to make decisions regarding which medications to prescribe – or not prescribe. People outside the 387 phone prefix could not call in to cancel their appointments, so there were a few holes in the schedule. The doctors couldn’t access the Internet for medical information or call a consultant for advice on a case. Neither they nor the nurses could place their notes into patient files. It was all work that had to be put off for another, undoubtedly busier, day.
According to one source, Jacob Muus summed it all up by saying, “I’m going to bed early tonight.”
Maybe Jacob was already asleep at 9:53 p.m. that night when Cook County was able to access the world once again.
Here are some things
people couldn’t do
because of the outage:
¢ Call 911.
¢ Send medical test results to
specialists for evaluation.
¢ If you were a grocery store or
restaurant, place an order for
your next shipment of food.
¢ Conduct business
outside the county
from a home office.
¢ Conduct research
on the Internet.
¢ Access and submit
assignments that were due
in online classes.
¢ Receive hotel reservations
or cancellations.
¢ Send or receive faxes. ¢ Make plane reservations.
¢ Call to tell someone you
would not be on the flight
they were coming to pick
you up from.
¢ Order prescription refills
outside the county.
¢ Have your insurance
company authorize payment
for a prescription you
needed to pick up locally.
¢ Get cash from an ATM.
¢ Wire-transfer money
from a bank, or receive
a wire transfer.
¢ Run credit card transactions. ¢ Pay bills online or by phone. ¢ Buy or sell stock.
¢ Upload the latest
online edition of the
Cook County News-Herald.
¢ Waste your time on YouTube.
¢ And worst of all,
if you are
a teenager, you could not text your friends.
Leave a Reply