"Under normal circumstances our network in the North Coast has multiple routes along which we can reroute traffic. Unfortunately, with more than 15 fires across 8 counties damage to the area was severe."

I just spoke with AT & T spokesperson Steven Ramirez. He released the following statement as a follow up to some questions, from my readers. 

"We do our best to make as many improvements as possible and address the impact of natural disasters in an effort to avoid and/or minimize all outages." 

"Under normal circumstances our network in the North Coast has multiple routes along which we can reroute traffic. Unfortunately, with more than 15 fires across 8 counties damage to the area was severe. Despite these conditions, our teams worked around the clock to engineer a solution and replace the damaged cable."

"In this case, having redundant a path directly helped us restore service much faster than we would have without redundancy. Even though this fire hit so many segments – we had sufficient redundancy to get service restored in 48 hours. Most service was restored from Willits to Eureka late last night."

For more information on our response to the wildfires, please check our blog:

http://about.att.com/inside_connections_blog/california_fires