Weathering a FireStorm
Charter, Cox, Time Warner Cable Work Through Fires to Keep Customers Served
by K.C. Neel -- Multichannel News, 2/17/2008 7:00:00 PM
In late October 2007, for the second time in four years a rash of wildfires raged out of control, gobbling up over a half million acres and thousands of homes in Southern California. Just when everyone thought the worst was over, Malibu was hit again the first week of November.
Some 23 fires burned from Oct. 20 to Nov. 9, according to the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. Ten people died and another 139 were injured. A total of 517,267 acres burned and 3,204 structures — 2,233 homes, five businesses and 966 outbuildings — were destroyed. More than a half million people were given mandatory evacuation notices; 321,500 actually left their homes. As of Dec. 18, some 19,000 residents affected by the Southern California wildfires had applied for federal grants and loans, according to the Los Angeles Times. Insurance claims topped $2 billion.
Like utility companies, the area’s cable systems were not spared. Operators implemented disaster plans to safeguard or restore services — even helping their competitors get services back up and running to customers in its footprint. Meanwhile, system employees had to contend with personal risk, evacuations and, in some instances, loss of property.
For their well-executed plans and ultimate perseverance — individually, as well as collaboratively — the editors of Multichannel News have named Charter Communications Southern California, Cox Communications San Diego and Orange County/Palos Verdes, Time Warner Cable San Diego and Los Angeles Systems of the Year.
FIRST ALERT
Fred Lutz was in church when he got the text message. A fire in Malibu, Calif., was burning out of control on Sunday, Oct. 21, as furious Santa Ana winds fueled the blaze in defiance of firefighters’ best efforts to stomp them down.
Lutz, vice president and general manager of Charter Communications’ Southern California operations, and the rest of his senior team dropped whatever they were doing and quickly gathered at Charter’s offices to begin strategizing on how to handle the mushrooming calamity. The system’s plant and property were heavily damaged or destroyed by the fires that ravaged the area in 2003. They were determined to avoid the same disaster this time.
Larry Hofer, vice president of people services for Cox San Diego received the mass emergency phone call to immediately evacuate on Monday morning as several fires raged unrestrained in the San Diego area. Hofer, his wife and his kids left the neighborhood and stayed in a hotel room for four days. Seven of Cox San Diego’s top 12 executives found themselves doing the exact same thing. Yet they still managed to meet every two hours to execute the system’s disaster plans and work around the fires that were spread scattershot around the county.
Duffy Leone, senior vice president and general manager of Cox Communications Orange County/Palos Verdes and a former Cox San Diego executive, was watching CNN at the National Cable & Telecommunications Association’s headquarters on Monday morning when he saw the house he used to own in San Diego going up in flames. Fires were also raging in Orange County and it took him a few days to get back to California, but fortunately his operating team had undergone an emergency preparedness drill two weeks earlier. Coincidentally, part of the drill was to operate without Leone present.
Time Warner Cable in San Diego closed its offices on Monday, Oct. 22, so the almost 300 of the system’s 800 employees who were evacuated could find alternative lodging and get their affairs in order, said Marc Farrar, vice president of public affairs.
Farrar was among those needing a place to stay: He packed his wife, his four-month-old son, two cats and a dog into the car and ensconced them for two days in the last hotel room he could find in town while he worked at the office. The building remained officially closed until Wednesday, but many employees came to work and the company continued to follow through with as many service calls as possible in the unaffected areas of its footprint, Farrar said.
The blazes largely skipped Time Warner Cable’s Los Angeles Division footprint, but the operator still had to close several of its retail stores and lost some commercial services due to smoke and high winds, according to Patti Rockenwagner, the system’s vice president of communications. Time Warner Cable Los Angeles also lent a helping hand to Charter, allowing the operator to tap into Time Warner’s San Bernardino plant — a move that temporarily allowed Charter to deliver basic and expanded video signals to its customers in the Lake Arrowhead area.
ASSESSING DAMAGE
The randomness of the fires, which burned some structures to the ground while leaving others right next door untouched, meant keeping track of the damage was difficult. Farrar estimates about 300 homes served by Time Warner San Diego were lost in the fire. Charter executives figure about 400 homes owned or rented by Charter customers were lost in the mountainous Lake Arrowhead area.
Cox San Diego was still assessing how many of its customers had been affected by the fires. Almost 100 customers contacted the company’s special fire victims’ assistance team and claimed a total loss. But Bill Geppert, senior vice president and general manager of Cox San Diego, estimated that number could be much higher and noted that it doesn’t include the hundreds of homes that sustained serious damage.
Charter lost 8,000 feet of backbone fiber in the October fires and another mile of fiber in the November blaze above Malibu. Crews manually hauled fiber into one of the canyons to restore service. Several nodes were either destroyed or damaged throughout Charter’s footprint.
Time Warner San Diego had to replace almost five miles of fiber as a result of the fire but Farrar said the system didn’t experience many widespread outages. Cox’s Orange County/Palos Verdes system lost seven miles of fiber to fire in October, including part of a fiber ring connecting to Cox’s San Diego operations. Several nodes also sustained damage. Both systems strung fiber and eventually reconnected the ring. Service was restored within two days.
By the end of the first week, all the operators had fixed the vast majority of the outages, albeit some via temporary arrangements. In many cases, fiber was simply laid on the ground to get service reactivated quickly. Crews later strung fiber on new poles after they were replaced by the utility company.
Within two weeks, service was pretty much back to normal at all the systems. In several cases, the cable plant was operational before the utility companies could get power to the affected areas. Service from Cox, Charter and Time Warner was often restored before other utilities such as electricity, according to cable officials and some local news reports.
“We had this one customer who begged us to repair his drop and when the tech did it, he told the customer that even though Cox’s services were up and running, he wouldn’t be able to watch anything because there was still no power available from the utility company,” Hofer said. “But he had a generator in his garage, and before long, he was watching the World Series.”
STAFF CONCERNS
Similar stories played out in every part of those systems, according to company executives. While the operators were busy making and executing plans to repair and reactivate service, the first priority at every affected cable system was making sure all employees were accounted for and safe.
Staffers were given time off to get their lives and families in order before returning to work. Still, many workers clocked in as soon as possible despite hardships.
Hofer, who had moved to California from Seattle in April and had lived in his house for only two months when he received his evacuation notice, said more than 90% of the 280 Cox San Diego workers who were evacuated returned to work by the second day of the disaster.
“Once they had their families situated,” he said, “people came back to work because they know we are more than just television service. We are a lifeline service now. We don’t really have a policy for something like this. We just do what’s right and it worked out fine. We had an 85% attendance rate throughout the whole event. That is pretty amazing.”
But high attendance rates created issues that required attention. Cox San Diego executives learned from the fires in 2003 that air quality at the call center and administrative offices was detrimental to employee health. So Cox installed additional fans to filter smoke from the buildings and provided extra water for employees. Face masks were also available.
“From an HR perspective, we were better prepared than we were the last time this happened,” Hofer said. “But I think we could have stockpiled more supplies to make the environment more comfortable. We were so focused on the emotional well-being of our employees. We could have perhaps been a bit more focused on their physical well-being as well.”
Even so, employees were offered shelter, food, money to help relocate either temporarily or longer and they received paid time off while they got their affairs in order.
Cox OCPV set up cots and brought in extra food and supplies at its main building so evacuated employees could stay there. Two staffers who happen to be married to each other took Cox up on the offer. But the gesture was appreciated by everyone, said Rick Guerrero, vice president of broadband network engineering.
Cox San Diego provided employees who had damaged or lost homes with bridge financing so they could do things like pay bills before they were reimbursed from their insurance companies.
Charter supervisors in the mountains drove around the area connecting with employees who didn’t call into the office to make sure they were OK, Lutz said. Workers were urged to take care of their personal lives before dealing with work. It was the same story for employees at Time Warner Cable. Executives from all the cable operations praised their employees for the dedication they displayed during the ordeal. Lutz said he was grateful for their experience, knowledge and ability to get things done.
“They are amazing people,” said Lutz, who had moved to the area to run Charter’s Southern California operations in August. “Leadership is critical when lives are at stake and they must have clear thinking. I realized quickly that I have great leadership in place here. I didn’t have second-guess decisions. They were made fast and they were the right decisions the first time.”
CUSTOMER CARE
While the operators were worried about and proud of their employees, they were simultaneously taking as many steps as possible to make sure their customers were not too inconvenienced.
All the cable operators placed staffers at evacuation and relocation centers to help customers with service issues. They provided information on when service would be available in their neighborhoods and set up a number of policies for customers who had damaged or lost homes.
Cox San Diego and OCPV, Charter and Time Warner San Diego also tried to provide customers with as much information as possible as it became available.
Charter technician Kelly Pajak spent over a week taking hundreds of photos of homes and addresses and posting them on a local Web site so residents could determine whether they had homes to go back to or not.
Diane Presley, a customer service supervisor for Time Warner Cable’s Yucca Valley, Calif., call center, manned an assistance center in the San Diego area and cross-checked various information sources to help evacuees determine whether their homes still existed.
Both efforts proved to be the ultimate customer service for local residents, the cable employees said. Presley and Pajak admitted it was hard telling people their houses were gone. But both noted that folks wanted and needed to know and said it was the right thing to do regardless of how difficult it was for them.
Time Warner Los Angeles sent its Surf Shack event vehicle to a fire evacuation site in San Bernardino, giving displaced residents the opportunity to use the company’s voice, video and Internet services free of charge. The operator also worked with Rent-A-Center to donate six large-screen TV sets so that residents at the evacuation center could watch news updates on the fire, as well as be entertained by programs offered on Time Warner’s channel lineup.
No sooner had Orange County officials opened the first evacuation center in the area, Cox OCPV was wiring the center for video service, Guerrero said. The operator also provided the center with three big-screen TVs — two that generally televised fire coverage and a third that aired kids programming from channels like Disney and Nickelodeon. Cox offered to hook up the center with phone and Internet service, too. But officials at that site only wanted video, he said.
“The tech we sent over there was evacuated himself,” Leone said. “He moved his family and then did the set-up. The depth of the sacrifices our employees endured was enormous but they were all magnificent.”
FINANCIAL AID
Cox Orange County/Palos Verdes also donated $5,000 to the Red Cross and created a public service announcement giving details on where to find help. It also held a blood drive and set up help tables at all area evacuation centers to assist customers with their services. Charter gave a total of $10,000 for fire recovery efforts. The operator sponsored a production of Home for the Holidays to benefit the Jeran Foundation, a local charity supporting mountain residents. Charter also made a donation to Rebuilding Mountain Hearts and Lives.
Cox San Diego provided bedding, water and other supplies to all the evacuation centers in its service areas, according to vice president of business development and external affairs Sam Attisha. It also wired the evacuation centers for voice, video and Internet services if they weren’t already hooked up.
Cox’s high-definition local origination channel, Channel 4, held a week-long fund-raiser at a local mall that featured visits from several San Diego Padres baseball players and generated $49,000 ($24,000 in local donations and the rest from Cox) that went to the San Diego Community Foundation and the Red Cross.
Time Warner San Diego pulled 800 feet of wire from a trunk line to hook up an evacuation center that needed service, Farrar said. And because the San Diego operations are broken into two systems — San Diego and Palm Springs — the operator was able to reroute customer service calls to the Palm Springs call center. The company also set up an 800-number that dealt specifically with fire-related customer service issues.
Many local and national companies and organizations also made charitable donations and provided financial assistance to the communities and residents affected by the wildfires. An East Coast car dealership donated $100,000 to the Red Cross for relief following the fires and all 30 San Diego Baskin-Robbins ice cream stores donated 10% of their sales to The San Diego Foundation “After The Fires Fund.” The Cable Hope Fund, the non-profit foundation created to provide cable industry support for relief to victims of natural disasters, donated $20,000 to the San Diego Food Bank and Santa Clarita Valley Disaster Coalition.
In addition to the monetary donations and fund-raising efforts the local systems undertook, Charter, Cox and Time Warner Cable also provided financial and organizational relief to affected customers.
All the operators saved phone numbers and e-mail addresses for up to 18 months and agreed to forward calls to new residences. Time Warner San Diego stopped billing accounts the day before the fires started and will give customers a free month of whatever level service they were taking before the fires after they relocate or rebuild. The system also made sure no charges were incurred for lost equipment.
Cox San Diego wrote every balance down to zero for residents who were displaced by the wildfires, Atticha said.
“The fact that we were so visible and spread out to help and be available to people fit our mission to be the trusted provider,” Geppert said. “During the 2003 fires we were so focused on getting the plant back up and running that some other things fell through the cracks. This time we able to concentrate on multiple things at the same time. There was no scrambling. Everyone assumed their roles and adjusted quickly. We were in front of the situation all week. I am very proud of these folks.”
BEST-LAID PLANS
Each system had some sort of emergency preparedness plans in place before the fires, but all the executives admitted those formulas only go so far. At some point, making decisions on the fly and reacting to events as they unfold is the only course of action.
Jim Sayer, director of technical operations for Charter Southern California, led a team of executives that started making “what if...” plans during the operator’s first meeting on Sunday afternoon. The team took the emergency plans Charter’s Louisiana operations had put into place for hurricanes and modified it to fit the California wildfire emergency, said Terri Stephenson, director of operations for Charter’s Southern California operations.
“We created Scenarios A, B and C,” Lutz said. “We have preparedness plans, but we had to react on the fly.”
All that planning was worth the effort, he said, because the system was able to quickly move resources and inventory around to fit the needs of any given situation.
For instance, contractors and in-house technicians were moved from other areas such as Long Beach and San Gabriel to reconstruct downed plant. Fiber and coax was transferred from various warehouses so it would be easily assessable when reconstruction could begin. Anticipating plant damage allowed Stephenson and her team to communicate quickly with vendors on product replacement.
“All the vendors were great,” she said, noting that CommScope was particularly accommodating when it came to delivering fiber and coax needed to replace destroyed plant. Other operators agreed.
All Cox systems perform emergency drills every few years. The drills differ according to region and disaster, but the premise of the exercises is designed to work across calamities.
Cox OCPV held a practice drill just two weeks before the October fires. Although that drill centered on an Avian Flu breakout, staffers had to plan for what would happen if their top executives were out of pocket. That’s exactly what happened in October: Leone and Jim Leach, vice president of public affairs, were in Washington. Sharon Smith, vice president of employee resources, was in Atlanta.
The lessons learned from the drill were beneficial in helping the staff deal with the October fires, Guerrero said. Cox San Diego held similar drills on June 19, 2003 — about four months prior to the 2003 fires — and on Jan. 25, 2006, which dealt with a chemical explosion.
“The disasters are different, but they do help us prepare for emergencies,” Geppert said.
LESSONS LEARNED
The systems all performed post-mortems following the fires and in every case, the operators said they learned lessons on what to do and what not to do the next time disaster strikes.
Some of the tutorials had common themes: All the operators said they’d like to have access to more real-time information to better maneuver recovery and reconstruction efforts. They also admitted that regardless of how well they plan ahead, disasters rarely fit into nice, neat holes. Being nimble, quick and flexible is required. All the executives also know that they will continue to face disasters similar to those experienced last fall. Malibu has had major fires two times a decade since the 1920s, according to The Malibu Times.
“It’s not really a question of whether we have fires again,” Geppert said. “It’s a matter of when.”
And if it’s not fires, it could be earthquakes, mudslides or snow. A month after the wildfires ravaged the landscape, long-awaited rain came to the region. But it wasn’t overly welcome. It rained more than two inches in some areas causing some local authorities to worry about mudslides. And if that wasn’t enough, Charter’s mountain systems dealt with a major snow storm that left more than two feet of snow on the ground in January. Traffic was snarled, power was out. But cable employees took it all in stride.
“Disaster can strike anywhere,” Lutz said. “You just have to be as prepared as you can and think clearly.”
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