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It’s been an exciting week here at InfoWest.  The long wave of snow and rain storms has posed a few challenges, but we’re doing our best to stay on top of them.  Here’s an update on current efforts.

Mesquite / Scenic Arizona

Over the past 2 weeks, we’ve been working in bad weather conditions to repair a generator at the location we lease on top of Utah hill.  We got the

Utah Hill - 1/2 Way Up 12/21/2010

generator and the automatic switching gear working again and tested last week in time for the storm.  Yesterday around 1pm , Utah Power went out on the hill.  Unfortunately the generator did not start up as expected.  Expert sledders Ryon and Josh headed up the hill in snowmobiles late in the afternoon to attempt another repair. The snow storm was bad enough and the snow deep enough that they took much longer to get up the hill than we expected. Before they reached the summit it got dark and too dangerous to continue.   Ryon and Kelly will attempt to get back up there today.

Our batteries kept our equipment running until about 4 o’clock this morning.  I’ll post an update here in the comments when we get the generator running again.

Northern Washington County – Leeds, Silver Reef, Rockville, Springdale

One of our solar-powered sites went down late yesterday morning, due to a weak battery.  We were able to get a generator to the site to recharge the batteries and got those sites running again yesterday afternoon.   We will be testing all the batteries and replacing any that are weak today.  We’ve dispatched a second generator to ensure another solar-powered site near Silver Reef weathers the storm.

Early this morning (about 5am) a Cisco 3550 switch on that same path failed.  This particular failure does not appear to have been weather or power related.  Aaron replaced that switch at about 7:30 this morning and currently services are up and running in these areas.

New Harmony area

We’ve largely weathered the storm in New Harmony, but there is a risk we will see some outages before the storm is over.  The site we use is primarily solar-powered, with wind backup.  Last week Ryon and Kelly made an inspection trip to the site on snowmobiles and found that our backup wind generator was burned up, probably due to overly-powerful winds.  We replaced the wind turbine with a more robust model, but the high winds (currently gusting 50-80mph) cause it to go into a “safety braking” mode where it cannot produce power.  Once the wind calms down,  it should provide a much-needed “boost” to our battery charging capacity at the site.  We’re looking for a small wind generator that can handle the strong winds at the site (suggestions welcome!).   You can see the weather conditions in our Facebook video blog post from earlier in the week.

Proactive Measures

Over the past year, we’ve added high capacity battery backups to most of our remote sites, and we monitor all the sites for power problems so we can respond to outages before service is affected.  Additionally, we’ve purchased two new portable propane generators for extended backup times.  We plan to add more generators so we can more quickly respond to power outages at remote locations, and will be installing permanent backup generators at a number of remote locations soon.

As always, we’re trying to find ways to better monitor our services and will be reviewing the events of this week to find ways to better battle and prepare for the elements!

PLEASE SEE UPDATES IN THE COMMENTS!