Friday our phone lines were jammed with inquiries about the power outage. It was extremely difficult to perform our regular duties with the volume of calls we received. And you have to remember, when something like this happens (power outage) we are busier than usual handling the issue that caused the problem.
I’m not trying to be critical of anyone who called but we have this problem just about every time people lose some type of service be it cable, electric, water, etc. For some reason a lot of people want to call the police dept as if we are information. They want to know what happened. They want to know when service will be returned. STOP! DO NOT CALL THE POLICE DEPT FOR THIS OR ANY OTHER INFORMATION. We dispatch your safety forces. We do not fix cable, electric, water, etc. Rarely do they tell us what the problem is and/or how long it will be out. If they give us a time its a guess anyway. If you are curious about how widespread the problem is take a walk or drive around and see for yourself. And why does it matter why the your electric/cable/water is out anyway. Knowing the reason doesn’t make it come back any faster it only satisfies your curiosity.
For example: Friday, we had three water main breaks we were dealing with. We had a main east/west artery road closed on the busiest traffic day of the week. We had the power go out. Then we had problems with powering our dispatch center. We had no radios for a while, we had no internet (not for surfing but to run our daily operations). We had telephone issues. And on top of that we had people (lots of them) inquiring about what caused the power to go out and when was it going to come back on.
I can’t say it strongly enough. DO NOT call the Police Dept when you lose services!!! Resist the urge, call the service provider direct, then wait it out like the rest of us.
