Storm Report - Chicagoland (Northwest Indiana Specifically)

[gusherb]

I'm sure someone reading this post has heard on the news by now that Chicagoland got hammered by a freak storm that almost literally came out of nowhere and toppled trees within a matter of seconds as it swept in at freakishly fast speeds.

I walked outside and sat on the front porch while it was sunny and noticed some slight darnkess, 5 minutes later the sky started turning darker, and after 10 minutes I walked over to the neighbors two doors down and within another 10 minutes the storm swept in and kicked up 80 MPH wind gusts and killed the power almost right away. I was impressed with the storms intensity, it moved in and started very swiftly which is what caused all the trees to fall everywhere. 

 

After driving around assessing damage it looked like all hell broke loose! Hadn't seen one like this in 6 years at least. 

 

Of course when storms like this come through and power gets knocked out people turn to their cellphones and the networks they're on... and I'm pleased to say that Sprint was "business as usual"!  (not like it was a huge disaster or anything, but damn never seen so many power outages at once from anything less then a tornado!) 

 

I (like probably thousands of other people) got on the internet and started talking on the phone right away (what better way to test the networks abilities in high demand situations?) and didn't experience anything out of the ordinary, so that was good! 

 

I was getting 16 Mbps as usual on LTE on the site by my house that I KNOW had to have had no power to it, not sure whether it has a back up generator or not I don't think any Sprint sites do (?). Also I'm not sure exactly how many hours the back up batteries are rated for but I know the sites stayed up during the 6 hours that power was out. (curious as to what happens when the power is out for 24 hours or more but don't wanna find out!) 

 

This all takes me back to when we DID have a tornado sweep through in 2008 and then floods come through a month later and it seriously crippled AT&T's network (the network I was on at the time) and signal became iffy and getting calls through was a chore. It took over a month for it to get anywhere near normal. 

 

Anyone have any reports of Sprint's post NV network during real natural disasters? (more then just a destructive thunderstorm like we had today) 

[Boosted20V]

I believe the back ups Sprint uses will last ~8 hours. After that, you're going to be roaming on a VZ site with a generator.

[Rukin1]

We were missed by that storm by like 10 or 20 miles. It got dark and it went from 92 to 65 in a matter of seconds.

[digiblur]

Wouldn't have known a thing if it wasn't for this thread.  Just the nature of the beast.  Like when Hurricane Gustav hit my area pretty hard, a friend of mine in the northeast called me up 3 days after asking why I wasn't online much.  "Umm...you see there's this thing called electricity that makes the cable modem go, plus the cable line is sitting under a tree in the back of the neighborhood."  I get this long pause then "I thought you guys were done with that since it wasn't on the news."  Yeah. 

[delta772er]

Same thing happened here, crazy winds. There's trees down everywhere, but power stayed on (knock on wood our municipal-owned power company does an amazing job) and even my Frontier DSL did. It normally goes out at the first drop of rain.

[gusherb]

We used to have ATT DSL and that would stay up through anything. (Except close lightning strikes would make the modem lose sync momentarily).

Now the Internet is with Comcast and its already suffered one storm related outage (when the power didnt go out)

 

People are still out around here, the local utilities site lists 20,000 still out. Down from 77,000 last night.