• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Time Warner Cable Works to Restore Service to Beaumont, Texas, Customers

Posted on: Monday, 24 October 2005, 21:00 CDT

By Dan Wallach, The Beaumont Enterprise, Texas

Oct. 21--Charlie Bollich peered across the road from his Viking Street home north of Gladys Avenue as a contract crew from Time Warner Cable repaired neighborhood distribution equipment.

"I hope I get it back in time to watch the Astros win the World Series," Bollich said of his cable television service.

Mike Hamilton, a neighbor and owner of FiServ Inc., with whom Bollich sheltered at his San Jacinto Building office during Hurricane Rita, wanted his RoadRunner Internet service back.

"I'm in the data-processing business," Hamilton said. "I live on RoadRunner."

Time Warner General Manager Mike McKee said he has about 800 workers total in the restoration process as he spoke with Hamilton Thursday -- 600 of whom are from outside Southeast Texas.

McKee, who had evacuated to the Fort Worth area during the Sept. 24 storm, returned the next day to begin his damage assessment.

Entergy Texas had to come first, he said.

Electric power had to be restored prior to restoration of cable service.

Time Warner rents space on Entergy's poles to provide the equipment and wires that bring cable television service to the more than 90,000 customers in Jefferson, Hardin and Orange counties.

Entergy's service territory, which covers 24 counties in Southeast Texas and East Texas, suffered more than 9,000 broken poles in the hurricane.

Before Time Warner could begin to restore its service, Entergy and its contractors had to rebuild the electric infrastructure that Rita tore to pieces.

"Our guys could not start until Entergy was done. There's a sequence things have to happen in," he said. "I have nothing but kudos for Entergy for the magnificent job they did."

Now some Time Warner contractors are facing their own hurricane problems.

Mike Vandruff of Noble Resources Inc., a contractor from the Tampa-St.

Petersburg area in Florida, was waiting on a decision whether to return home as Hurricane Wilma began to take aim at the Florida peninsula's central Gulf Coast.

"If it doesn't hit us, it'll hit someone else," Vandruff said.

He and his colleagues have been in Southeast Texas for almost three weeks, working through profound tree damage.

Vandruff complimented the Southeast Texans he has met.

"It's awesome -- a lot of really polite people here," he said.

McKee said he thinks the reconstruction phase for the Beaumont area could be complete by Sunday. After that, crews must reattach the cable wires leading to homes from the neighborhood distribution equipment on the utility poles.

"Typically, the drop crews (the "drop" is the wire leading into homes) are three to five days behind the construction crews," he said.

In his initial assessment of damage, McKee predicted Time Warner would need to replace about a third of the drops to customers' homes. A later assessment put the number closer to half, he said.

McKee said he did not have a monetary estimate of the damage yet, but he put it in the "millions" of dollars.

"We've been figuring out how to get it done, not how much. We will recoup costs through continued service and new products," he said. "I don't anticipate any kind of price increase beyond the normal cost of doing business for programming. It's just something you do to keep customers satisfied."

Which, to the cable- and RoadRunner-less Hamilton, means "Gotta get it before Game 5."

-----

To see more of The Beaumont Enterprise, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.southeasttexaslive.com.

Copyright (c) 2005, The Beaumont Enterprise, Texas

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

TWX, FISV, ETR,

Source: The Beaumont Enterprise

More News in this Category