May 8, 1988 - Hinsdale CO Fire [Telecom]

Today (or yesterday, if you're reading this in digest mode) is/was the

20th anniversary of the Hinsdale, Illinois CO fire. Everybody on this list probably has his/her own story about that day, but here's mine ... from the Cable TV side.

In 1988, I was Manager of Tech Ops at the Warner Cable system in Oshkosh (at the time, Warner itself was an independent company, post Warner-Amex but pre Time-Warner). Our entire customer-record and billing system was hosted by CableData, based in Sacramento. The connection between Oshkosh and Sacramento was a leased line which, we quickly discovered, went through the Hinsdale CO.

When I arrived at work that Monday morning, our office manager was already trying to figure out what was wrong. I didn't know any more about the situation than he did, but it was apparent that we weren't getting any response from CableData.

We called CableData (which hadn't opened for the day), and talked to somebody else who didn't know anything. But he did know that something must be wrong because he'd already received other calls about a similar problem.

By this time, it was obvious that we were indeed cut off from Sacramento. After several phone calls to Sacramento and to Ameritech (or Wisconsin Bell or whatever it was in 1988), we got reconnected. I have no idea how they did it, but I recall thinking that the telco folks worked pretty fast to get us connected.

Of course, our own cable TV customers weren't happy. Some folks just couldn't swallow the idea that "the phone company" was responsible cable TV customer service problems.

Neal McLain

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Neal McLain
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