Hurricane Lala has moved on, but power and internet service are only slowly being restored. We were supposed to catch the tail-end of Tropical Storm Moke today, and feared further disruptions of services, but instead we had the first real summer day of the year. It is beautiful (though not the greatest weather for shoveling cinder).
I thought I understood how important the internet had become, but I appreciate it more now. Cell service is pretty spotty around here (and became nonexistent a few minutes into the storm), and most everyone relies on WiFi calling so they can call and text using an internet connection. When power went off (for the on-grid folks) and the internet fiber lines went down, people had no communications. Some folks whose roads weren’t blocked drove about twenty miles to get a glimmer of cell service (explaining the mysterious clusters of cars parked along the highway). A couple of dozen of us had our GMRS radios. But many, many folks were unable to communicate even to the neighborhood, let alone to distant worried loved ones.
Since HA and I have off-grid power (which didn’t fail) and satellite backup for our internet (which requires power), we were still connected. I had invited our neighbor across the street to come use our connection, but when she actually came over and I hooked her phone up to WiFi I suddenly realized just how important it was. Her daughter lives on O’ahu and had been frantically calling to see if she was okay. Her phone veritably screamed with notifications of text messages and voicemails. She spent at least a couple of hours texting and calling to reassure folks.
I was inspired, and put a note sealed in a zipper plastic bag on our front gate with the WiFi network name and password and a QR code for signing in (my network is pretty well hardened against abuse from within) and I dangled an extension cord through the fence so people who were still lacking power and internet could grab a connection and plug in to charge a phone. There’s also an area on the makai road near the studio that has good signal and a significant amount of off-street parking. We became a popular place, but I’m hoping that we’ll no longer be important this coming week as services come back online.
During the storm, when I had the only working phone in the area (before I’d realized I could share), our makai neighbor — the one who once helped us raise the roof on the pavilion — called me from the hospital. She’d fallen off a ladder the week before the storm, and had had surgery. She had called to say that she’d been discharged from the hospital, but couldn’t call anyone to let them know. I was able to tell her husband, though it didn’t immediately do any good because the road to town was closed by fallen trees. Eventually, though, the road got cleared and she made it home.
I suggested to her husband that he try our WiFi and see if the access point in the studio gave him usable signal. It did, though only from right by the window in an upstairs room over his garage. So he could go upstairs, park his chair and laptop by the window, and watch media, surf the web, and make phone calls but his wife — healing from multiple fractures — was stuck downstairs in the house without an internet connection. I know from experience how hard it can be when you’re used to being mobile and active and to get stuck indoors with no media. There’s only so much reading you can do!
I had an inspiration, and took an old wireless router I had stored in the garage. I re-flashed the firmware with OpenWRT and configured the box as a WiFi to ethernet bridge. He could then plug his Nest mesh router into the bridge, and there was enough signal that Neighbor S will be able to call family, stream movies, and enjoy the cesspit of social media during her convalescence. Pretty cool that it worked!
—2p
PS: The neighbor also loaned me his wheelbarrow, so I’m back to shoveling cinder.