Spring in Oklahoma goes hand in hand with severe weather. Damaging winds and other unpredictable phenomena take down poles and disrupt service for subscribers every year. OEC Fiber stands ready to respond, restoring service quickly and safely.
We take every outage seriously. We know the longer service is down, the less access to essential services subscribers may have. That is why we have crews on standby when severe weather is coming into the area. We want to be ready to respond the moment an outage occurs.
How OEC Fiber responds varies depending on the scope of the outage, but the core response stays the same. We work from the largest area of impact to the smallest.
“[First,] the electric crews have to get electric service restored,” said manager of fiber optic technicians, Jeremy Kilpatrick. “Then we get fiber back up. The main lines have to get put back up first. Then splicing and drops.”
Splicing is the process of connecting fiber optic cables together. Drops are the lines going to individual homes. Running lines to these homes only works if there is a primary system to connect to. Technicians often install a temporary or “temp” line to restore service until they can install a permanent line.
It’s not only the fiber line we keep an eye on. Our crews watch for damage on the electric side while working to restore fiber services. In a large outage situation, such as a tornado, non-service disrupting damage may go unnoticed when crews are working to get the lights back on.
“For example,” said Robert Jones, fiber optic technician, “we recently had a bunch of transformers that had been knocked off their foundation.”
Reporting these kinds of damages can reduce potential issues in the future. Identifying them before they result in service disruptions is as important, if not more so, as fixing them in the moment.
Not all service issues require a crew. Using the OEC Fiber Support app to diagnose issues can prevent unnecessary waiting when outages occur.
When the weather takes a turn for the worst, OEC Fiber’s mission is to be your connection lifeline. No matter how turbulent things get outside, we work hard to ensure our subscribers have the service they need.
