With Hurricane Irma causing some of its worst damage in the Florida Keys, Comcast is working as diligently as possible to restore services as quickly as possible to impacted local customers.
We’ve laid temporary fiber all the way down to Key West. Restoration crews are on the ground throughout the Keys assessing our network and equipment, examining our fiber routes to find parts ripped apart and damaged by the storm and then quickly deploying teams to areas where repairs are needed.
We are also in working with Monroe County to restore facilities county officials have identified as critical to their infrastructure. In areas that didn’t sustain as much damage from the storm, we have already been able to restore services for many customers.
Technicians are working to restore a lot of “downed drops” throughout the area – cables that connect buildings and individual homes to our network that were pulled down and damaged during the storm.
There are areas in the Keys where commercial power has been restored, but Xfinity services are not back up. In addition to the downed drops explained above, these pocket outages can be caused by a few things, including:
- Physical damage to our local plant
- Lack of commercial power to our nearby network, nodes and amplifiers that provide Comcast services to that local area
- Power surges that damaged personal computers, modems or routers
The scope of the work necessary to get services back up for all impacted customers is massive. We have already used more than 1.5 million feet of new cable to replace damaged lines. Across the state, our technicians have already repaired almost 40,000 downed drops.
The service restoration process is complex and can be difficult. In some cases, as our crews and other entities are working on storm damage recovery, our fiber lines can be cut again by things like debris removal crews or damaged poles.
We continue to deploy additional resources throughout the area daily and are committed to working as quickly as we can to get services back on for all impacted customers as soon as possible.
