A fallen limb in east Sonoma led to extensive internet outage 20 hours later

They say if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, it’s as if it didn’t happen.

But if a tree falls across a rural thoroughfare in Sonoma County, takes out a power line and cuts off all internet service and some cell phone service for up to 20,000 customers – people notice.

The tree in question is a towering eucalyptus that leans over Eighth Street East, just south of Denmark Street. According to Jana Fiorito of Mellinger Engineering on Eighth Street East, it lost a limb from the same branch on Feb. 3, Super Bowl Sunday – interrupting power to approximately 350 PG&E customers.

“We’ve got huge eucalyptus trees, and they keep falling and they’ve almost killed our employees,” said Fiorito in a phone message to the Index-Tribune on the morning of June 18. “And now we’ve lost power again last night – that’s like five times last year we’ve lost power.”

The Schell-Vista fire department confirmed that they responded to a fallen limb and small roadside fire on Monday afternoon, between 5 and 6 p.m. The location was about 100 yards north of Mellinger Engineering, at the driveway for a cookware outlet. Even a casual observer can notice one long limb in particular, leaning over the thoroughfare, where two branches have sheared off recently, each at least a foot in diameter.

It’s one of a number of eucalyptus and other trees crowding the discontinued railroad track running on the east side of Eighth Street, their trunks undercut by a small creek. Despite Fiorito’s efforts, she hasn’t been able to identify who is responsible for seeing that the trees are trimmed or removed before, as she put it, “somebody’s going to get killed.”

At the location of the fallen limb, across Eighth Street from the weakened tree, traces of the incident remain – a wire fence is bent where the limb landed, even several grape vines in the vineyard beyond it have been damaged. Traces of ash and a burned sign are at the site where a small fire broke out, and the internet cable is still swooping low between power poles.

The internet cable has been repaired, but the splices are clearly visible at the cable’s lowest point, still just inches off the ground pending repair by PG&E.

Fiorito’s report of the downed tree came to the Index-Tribune at 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday; two hours later, internet phone service began to fail, intermittently; and at 2:13 p.m. the entire internet grid serving much of downtown Sonoma failed completely – about 20 hours after the tree fell on Eighth Street.

For many, it was an inconvenience but the degree of the problem varied depending on one’s personal, or business, relationship to the internet.

At City Hall, work slowed as phone service and the internet went down, as they did at the city’s corporate yard on Eighth Street East.

Businesses were affected as well, and while some muddled through some closed outright. “We literally can’t do any transactions when the internet is down, so we shut the doors,” said Brittany Yargus of Wildeflower women’s boutique on West Napa. “Almost all of our transactions are on credit cards.”

Across the street at Perlé, another women’s clothing store, owner Erica Heald kept the doors open. “We had people come in because they couldn’t get any work done,” she said. Instead they took down credit card numbers and ran the transactions later, with the customers’ consent. They remained open until 6 p.m. – four minutes after the internet returned to much of downtown Sonoma.

Lia Transue saw a steady stream of customers at the Passdoor art gallery and design studio on the east side of the Plaza throughout the afternoon. She said she managed to conduct transactions despite the lack of internet or cell phone service.

“It brought me back to my youth and how we used to have to conduct transactions in stores,” she said. “I am just writing everything down and doing it all manually.”

It wasn’t just internet service that was broken, the cut fiber cable also affected Verizon serice “for some customers in parts of Sonoma,” said Verizon’s Heidi Flato. “Engineers quickly identified and resolved the issue, and service was restored by 5:48 p.m. Pacific on Wednesday.”

Joan Hammel, a communications vice-president with Comcast, said that service was mostly restored by 7 p.m. “I say ‘mostly’ because we have service capabilities fully restored, but it can take a little time for everyone to fully come back online.”

According to Hammel, they began receiving “significant alerts” about the cable early in the morning on Tuesday, acknowledging that at the time of the limb falling, “Comcast did not experience any customer impact.”

“However, as repairs got underway, our facilities were impacted,” continued Hammel. “Our fiber was damaged (and became disconnected), either because it had become brittle during the fire and was then moved and broke… or because it was actually cut during the repair work. We are assessing the situation now to determine those details.”

In other words, internet service may not have immediately been affected by the Monday night incident, but over time it showed signs of decreasing efficiency. It may not have been until a repair crew arrived on site, and realized the extent of the heat and fire damage to the cable, that service was cut off altogether.

“It had been damaged but we didn’t know that yet and somehow it didn’t disrupt service,” explained Hammel. “But when repairs started, our fiber was damaged further and that’s when services were disrupted.”

Hammel said an incident report was filed by the repair crew at 2:20 p.m., and they arrived on the scene at about 3 p.m. - after the cable had failed completely.

Throughout the incident, there were approximately 15,000 to 20,000 Comcast customers impacted. “It’s our understanding that other service providers also experienced service disruptions,” said Hammel.

It being a Tuesday, however, many in Sonoma were focused on the weekly party in the Plaza, the Valley of the Moon Certified Farmers Market. “The internet outage didn’t have a noticeable affect on the market,” said market manager Chris Welch. “Turnout for a warm summer night seemed typical.”

Contact Christian at [email protected].