Loss of Charter Cable Link Exacerbated
Crisis Conditions for Malibu
• City Officials Decry Lack of Backup
Equipment for TV, Internet and Phone Services
Charter Cable customers were disconnected
from the e-world Sunday, when the only Charter line to the
outside world burned at Bluffs Park, taking out that
company’s vital cable television, Internet and telephone
service during the fire emergency.
Compounding the problem, Charter could not
begin repairing individual connections anywhere in Malibu until
the connections to the company’s technical center in
Monterey Park were restored, which was supposed to happen
Tuesday night.
Some angry customers, including
Malibu’s mayor pro tem, said they wanted to know why a
crucial communications link did not have a backup, and why it
was placed over a mesa where predictable Malibu catastrophes
often sever utility lines.
City officials expressed surprise that
Charter had removed local television reception equipment from
Malibu, and transferred all local technical operations to a
facility 40 miles away, connected only by a single fiber
connection hanging above miles of disaster-vulnerable Pacific
Coast Highway.
“That’s incredible,
that’s unacceptable,” said Malibu mayor pro tem
Pamela Conley Ulich, whose home Internet and e-mail service was
dead. “I’m surprised they don’t have
alternate lines, and I’m disappointed.”
The failure of the entire system left
people in the city in varying degrees of electronic
nonexistence. Most affected are persons who switched their
landline telephone service to a cable-internet-telephone
bundle, and lost all three services.
Ninety percent of Charter’s Malibu
customers, and all of them in Topanga Canyon, were
affected. A relative handful of Malibu Charter customers
were able to see local television via a jury-rigged antenna
system that could not be extended citywide, said Charter vice
president Craig Watson.
Service went out Sunday morning when the
firm lost 4000 feet of fiber optic cable in the Canyon
Fire’s first hour.
Watson said his crews were staging
equipment and personnel in Malibu Monday, but could not begin
to restring the key link until Southern California Edison crews
finished replacing poles across the mesa between Bluffs Park
and the Ralph’s supermarket.
But Edison elected to abandon that reach of
power poles Tuesday morning, Watson said. At first light
Tuesday, Charter crews began drilling new pole holes and
getting ready to plug Malibu back into the worldwide grid.
Fiber junctions must be spliced, a delicate
and time-consuming operation involving technicians working with
microscopes, he said.
From the beginning of cable TV service
until a few months ago, Malibu residents received cable
television signals from a “head-end” at the north
end of Latigo Canyon Road. But the company, as it upgraded to
an all-digital system that can handle advanced internet and
telephone services, removed all the TV reception gear in
Malibu and placed it at an operations center in Monterey
Park, 10 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.
“This was done so we could provide
our customers with a centralized, professionally-staffed
service center,” Watson said. “All
television signals, as well as the controls and signals
for Internet and telephones, now come from our operations
center in Monterey Park.”
The company has acknowledged that it needed
a backup connection in case the path to Monterey Park failed
anywhere along the 50-mile route.
“Ironically, we have a signed
contract in hand right now to provide a second link in to
Malibu,” Watson said. The fire, however, hit before that
backup fiber optic could be patched into to the new system.
In western Malibu, far away from the fire
front and blocked by mountains from over-the-air local
television, worried people went to neighbors with satellite
dishes to see pictures of the fire and learn what was
happening.
Verizon landline phone and Internet service
interruptions were limited to places where equipment burned, a
spokesperson said, and cellular phone service from various
providers was not disrupted along the length of Malibu.
Satellite TV reception, and off-air reception in the few areas
that have it were unaffected by the fire.
Although some areas of Malibu sporadically
lost electric service due to the windstorm, most of the city
had continuous service during the emergency.
Water service from Los Angeles County
Water District 29 was not interrupted during the fires or
winds. Crews worked day and night to make sure that booster
stations, hydrants and other key links were functioning
normally.
Watson, whose company is in the midst of a
campaign to win converts to its packaged phone and internet
services, said the loss of service in Malibu was
“particularly painful.”
“We understand that we are not just
in the cable business anymore and, because of that we
understand that our customers are reliant on our
service,” Watson said.
