From: Mike Nice 

On Sun, 08 Dec 2002 14:24:31 -0500, janel wrote:

>Richard and Bob are near the coast.  I doubt if they got any ice down
>there.  I, however, am located in the dark and cold Upstate.

  I didn't lose power at home except for a few minutes.   Thursday morning at
3:08, the power went
off at work.  One of our main POPs is located in a power company's
facilities. They have a large
backup generator to cover their data center complex along with county EMS
communications.   The
backup generator didn't start.    After our UPS battery went down, our servers
shut down.

   So, as soon as Lowe's opened, I went to buy a new 5.5KW generator.   They
never did get the main
generator going until 5:00 PM, but they finally restored the main feeder at
11:00 AM.   Our main
office was still without power, so we moved the generator over there until
the power came back there
at about 4:30.   The power company had much more to lose than we did - their
data center buys power
by the minute and they can get stuck paying an exhorbitant price for power.
So they are going to
buy another locomotive-sized generator.

   We have a number of outdoor RF data connections.  Since the storm in this
area was a thermal
inversion (warm ground,  rain temp. below 32 so immediate freeze), it was
interesting to see which
styles of antennas lost connection - including some with ice shields.

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