I was up using the bathroom at about 04:30 on Sunday morning when I heard the distinctive sound of a large tree falling and crashing on the ground. Trees fall around here all the time, especially when it’s been raining a lot — and we’ve had 194” of rain so far this year. I didn’t give it a lot of thought, except to look out the windows and on the surveillance cameras to make sure it wasn’t too close. Then I went back to bed and forgot about it, until I was awakened by the sound of chain saws in the morning. The tree must have fallen really nearby, possibly on the road.
We’ve had lots of trees fall down on our road and they always get caught by the communications lines (mostly internet fiber) that run between the road and the trees up the mountain. There is no other road, and there are no other comms lines. Usually (and rather remarkably) the messenger cable strung between the poles is strong enough to support the tree, allowing limited traffic on the road (under the tree) and saving the communication lines from breakage.
This time, the tree won. Or, at least, the pole lost. The cables above all seemed to be functional (we didn’t lose our internet), but the pole holding the cables had a catastrophic failure.
It must have been a neighbor above us, probably trying to get to work, who cut up the tree and cleared the road. They were long gone before I walked out on the road and found the mess. I was tempted to assume that they had already called Hawaiian Tel and reported the downed lines and broken pole, but I eventually decided to call it in anyway. It took over two hours to report the damage, and I’m fairly confident that the neighbor who did the clearing — presumably already late for work — didn’t wade through that phone nightmare.
The next day (today), HTel showed up to assess the damage. They cut up the part of the tree that was on the wires and said they were going to replace the pole. They were here for several hours. In the afternoon, when I walked down to see our new pole, I discovered, instead that the tangle of wires were simply elevated above the road and tied to a tree.
The red outline shows the white rope used to suspend the wires from a nearby tree. The broken pole? It’s still there.
Am I foolish to believe that they’ll be back in a day or two to clean this mess up?
—2p