Comcast Restores Service To 81% Of Houston-Area Customers
Workers Still Must Overcome Hurricane Ike’s Electrical Outages, Physical Damages
By Mike Reynolds -- Multichannel News, 9/26/2008 1:41:00 PM
Comcast Corp. continues to make progress in its service restoration efforts in its Greater Texas Gulf Coast region in the wake of Hurricane Ike.
As of Friday afternoon, Ray Purser, Comcast’s vice president of communications for Houston, said that 81% of its customers in the area had regained their cable service. That’s up from 70% on Monday.
Comcast, which has some 2,700 local employees, has also retained the service of 500 cable technicians from around the nation, to turn service back on in the Houston and Galveston areas, where 500,000 remain without electricity due to the ravages of the hurricane, which crushed the area on Sept. 13.
Purser said that in many cases, Comcast services reboot when the electrical power comes back on. However, there are other neighborhoods where nodes extending to different residences have to be serviced.
“We’ve made a lot of progress this week, but there is still plenty of work to do,” said Purser, who noted that Comcast will not be restoring all of its customers because sadly a number of areas, particularly in Galveston, have been “totally devastated by the storm.”
Comcast is offering outage-related credits to subscribers who ask for them in the region. Customers seeking a refund tied to Ike damages should call 1-800-COMCAST or by clicking on the “contact us” link at www. comcast.com.
