TWO HARBORS -- The Minnesota president of Qwest was in Two Harbors on Wednesday to meet with two Lake County Board members and the county sheriff to talk about the fiber optic line break Jan. 26.
John Stanoch, who asked that members of the media be excluded from the meeting, told County Commissioner Paul Bergman the purpose of the visit was to "open up a better line of communication and listen to your concerns."
Bergman said the meeting went well.
"It was a good meeting with a lot of frank discussion," he said, expressing appreciation for the visit and that Qwest didn't get "corporate amnesia" when it came to the area and problems highlighted by the outage.
Stanoch said Qwest still hasn't determined how its line was severed under the streets of Duluth. Claims that it was caused by a steam pipe failure have been refuted by Duluth officials. Qwest is saying only that some kind of heat is likely to blame.
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"The sheriff said, 'That's your problem'," Bergman said, quoting Lake County Sheriff Carey Johnson. Bergman said what he and other county officials wanted to know was how a line would be rerouted if a break happened again, so that 911 service would be maintained.
"Qwest calls it 'rerouting diversity'," Bergman said with a laugh at the phrase. He said Stanoch explained that when the lines were laid in the late 1980s, redundant lines ran next to main lines, with the thought that most accidents sever only one line. On Jan. 26, everything in one spot was severed.
"Technically, they had redundancy," Bergman said of Stanoch's explanation of practices in 1987. "The undertone was that's the way it was done back then."
Qwest is willing to talk with the county about sharing to create a looped telecommunications system, basically a line that runs from Two Harbors, to Ely, over to Cook County, then back down the shore.
"If something gets lost one way, you get it from the other side," Bergman said.
The 12-hour outage left Lake and Cook counties along the North Shore without landline or cell phone coverage or Internet. Concerns about the outage have been fueled by the fact that 911-emergency service also was down.
B.J. Kohlstedt, the Lake County emergency management coordinator, has provided the County Board a review of the outage and lessons learned. She said there was a lack of understanding about how the county is wired, saying that if she had known of places where phone and Internet were working -- using satellite -- the county could have spread word to media outlets about the outage and response.
"There was confusion about exactly which services were out and where," she wrote.
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She also said a "looped" fiber optic line, a redundant line, needs to be available as a backup.
She said the county plan to use phone trees to contact radio operators and other emergency responders spread across the county would have to be changed in case all phone service ever goes down.
Kohlstedt made four recommendations to the board:
Install a satellite dish at the county courthouse as a backup. Stanoch said Qwest technicians would come to Two Harbors again to talk about technical issues but only after it has finished investigating how its line was severed.
