On 2017-10-19 03:00, Sean Donelan wrote:
not intended for long-term, continuous use. The generators will need maintenance and likely experience unscheduled failures the longer they're used.
Permanent duty diesel generators exist. Many northern communities in Canada run on them as their 7/24 power source. It *shouldn't* have taken long after Maria for locals to know how much damage there had been to electrical grid and that if it's gonna take months to fix, you're gonna need constant duty generators. What isn't clear to me is whether everything still depends on FEMA/army help, or whether business is able to function autonomously and get their own generators without the army confiscating them to be delieved to a hospital instead. And if you're a telco who is deprived of revenues because almost all your customers are without power, do you spend your own money and effort to try to get a permanent duty diesel generator to maintain your central office, or do you wait for government to install one for you ? It is one thing to be benevolent and wanting to have your network backbone up, but financial realities of the cost of running a business without revenues will eventually hit you when the disaster lasts for months instead of days.