News

About the Iowa Floods

A member of the ISP-Wireless list writes about his experience of the floods, from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

[June 17, 2008]

On the ISP-Wireless list on Sunday, Chris Kelly of CCR in Cedar Rapids, Iowa wrote:

Hello all,

Just thought you guys might be interested to know about a couple WISPs in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The Cedar River went from not just breaking the 1929 flood record of 20.5' but smashing it beyond the wildest dreams of the hydrologists and finally crested at over 31.5'.

The only ISPs in Cedar Rapids that survived without any significant outage times were WISPs. Circle Computer Resources—CCR (a.k.a Last Marathon Networks) and Dynamic Broadband (DYBB). We both use an Involta datacenter that is located in downtown Cedar Rapids.The datacenter completely lost grid power, then backup diesel power (the transfer switch was in the basement) and, finally, the backup generator that was brought in via an 18 wheeler that was in the alley because "the water could not ever get that high".

A day before CCR (us) and DYBB found out the transfer switch was in the basement of the datacenter and we started hauling generators in the 3rd and 4th floor for our servers and radios. We fired them up and bought more and have been keeping everthing running since. Fortunately there is a skywalk downtown that allows us access without having to get through deep and raging rivers in the streets. Also the fiber, that was below street level, fortunately survived.

We are not out of the woods yet, but, at least, the situation is stable. We're hoping to get through the next few weeks without any outages. We think we can do it as long as the security folks allow us access to add fuel to, and babysit the generators.

Anyway, thanks to all the folks at Involta, DYBB, the Cedar Rapids Police, the Iowa National Guard our own CCR Staff we were able to keep the Internet up and running while all of the monsters like Qwest, Medicom and others were all down hard.

Chris Kelly

Circle Computer Resources

Last Marathon Networks

This note from Chris Kelly also appeared on Broadband Reports.

—End