quote:

Originally posted by smlsig:
Quattro thank you for taking the time to to post this thread. We have a home in Arden near the airport but we’re out of the country when Helene hit. We contemplated cancelling our trip but quickly realized that resources were stretched very thin and since our house was undamaged we could wait until we returned in mid November.

As a small add on to your story, once I returned I found out that water had just been restored the day before, over SIX weeks after the storm.Amazing. I tried to get our internet up and was getting more and more frustrated so I decided to go outside and look at all the downed trees we had (about 25 full size ones) and noticed across one of the root balls of a tree that had fallen over was an orange wire! My internet line. It was getting late so I decided to go into Asheville the next morning and use the wifi at a little breakfast place we go to and call Spectrum. The last time I had to do that it took them 2 weeks to come to my place so I was expecting to wait. When I finally got a live person on the phone I explained to the nice woman that a root ball had pulled up our wire and she asked me where I lived. She then put me on hold (and I was expecting to wait another 15 minutes) and came back a minute later and said she could have a team there in half an hour!!! WTF? I haven’t finished my breakfast yet so I asked her if we could postpone the call to 1 pm and she said yes.

One o’clock rolls around and two vans roll up and the guys confirm that the wire was the culprit. They told me that they were from San Diego and were part of a team of more than 100 people that Spectrum had pulled from all over the country to try and get things up and running. They had been working almost exclusively in Black Mountain and said that have several more months of work there.. They spliced my wire up and came inside to make sure everything was working properly. That was the best utility service I had ever received.