Sunday morning, August 14th, you awaken to find water rising in your home. You reach for your cell phone to call for help and – no service.
“You can’t get help. You’re looking for family members. You have to find a place to stay. You need transportation, and on, and on, and on,” Public Service Commissioner Lambert Boissiere recounted during Wednesday’s PSC meeting.
Louisiana’s Public Service Commission cross-examined AT&T about their system failure during the flood.
“I felt very angry,” Boissiere said when he learned a main switching station had flooded, causing the massive service outage that affected residents, government officials and first responders alike. “I’m like, why would they have this switching station in such a flood area?”
“The site here in Baton Rouge that was – I guess you would say – the heart of our wireless operation is located above the FEMA 500-year flood plain,” AT&T External Affairs director Rick Dement said, in the company’s defense.
“But that doesn’t mean just because they don’t draw the map, we won’t have another event,” Commissioner Scott Angelle interjected, urging the communications company to do a risk assessment and plan for more “target-hardening” of crucial assets.
“This was just an event that was an act of God, a catastrophe that none of us planned for or expected,” Dement said.
“You’re not just a company. You’re a lifeline, in many ways, to people, and you have to do the best you can to maintain reliability,” Boissiere admonished.
“We want to make durn sure that people that have been out of service not have to pay for the service and get every dime of credit they deserve,” Commissioner Foster Campbell told the AT&T officials. “And we do not want anybody making one penny excess profit off of this tragedy.”
“We always want to do right by our customers,” Dement protested, “And we have issued a statement, you know, offering credits and relief for overages.”
Campbell wanted to be sure customers know what those credits are, and that the phone company’s offer was made part of the PSC’s official record.
“Y’all are offering a one-time credit worth 50-percent off of their monthly service. Additionally, customers in parishes declared in a state of emergency who have incurred data overcharges will be credited,” Campbell read from the company’s statement.
And at their next meeting, the Public Service Commission will be hearing reports on all the utilities that had service interruptions during the August flood.