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City Council Meeting January 8, 2001 Page 16 Fire Department for what they did in helping locate lines and downed tree limbs and reporting those to the TXU crews, and they should be highly commended. Tim Masters, General Manager of Cox Communications, came forward telling the City Council thatthey basically experienced the same difficulties that everyone in the room did from the ice storm. He said at one point, they were totally down in their cable system because they lost power at their main office and their backup generator failed. Mr. Masters said they were able to acquire another generator and get the system back up. Mr. Masters said to give a scope of what they were dealing with, they did not lose main line hard cable, which is the trunks and feeder lines in the system, but they were affected in two primary areas. They were affected with power as they have over 100 commercial power locations in their system in Paris and on top of that, they lost over 2,000 service drops from the poles to homes. He said it was a monumental task to coordinate where to place generators to try to get customers back on that once their power was back on, to get contractors and additional staff in, and to try to restore the service drops that were down. Mr. Masters said at this point in time, they have come a long way, but they are still receiving individual calls of service outage, but it has slowed down tremendously in the last few days. Mr. Masters advised the City Council that they also have insurance that will cover the cost of the damages to their system and the customers will not be affected. Mr. Skip Ogle with Southwestern Bell Telephone came forward telling the City Council that following an initial outage at 4:30 P. M. on December 25t" , Southwestern Bell experienced a loss of commercial power to their central office and an emergency generator powered the office for approximately 12 hours from about 4:00 P. M. that afternoon until about 4:00 A. M. the morning of the 26t", until theirgeneratorfailed. Mr. Ogle said they had battery backup to power their central office for about four hours until those batteries were depleted, so at 8:00 A. M. they lost their telephone service in Paris along with theircentral office just north of Paris. At approximately 5:00 P. M. that same day power was restored to the new backup generator and also the commercial power was restored to the central office. Mr. Ogle said upon restoration of the power, telephone service began to be restored and that had to be done in phases. Southwestern Bell service repairmen were dispatched in teams starting in