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Jacob Moos first noticed something was wrong when a customer tried to use a gift card early Friday morning.
“And I was amazed why not,” said Moose, owner of Johnson’s Foods grocery store in Grand Marais. I tried using different financial records and seeing if it would work on those but it didn’t.”
Muus quickly realized that his shop had lost internet service. So he decided to stop accepting credit cards, because while his system was set up to store card information, he had no way to verify that the customer’s account was in good standing.
Some customers were writing checks, but since the ATMs in town were not working either, many tourists were “in dire straits if they didn’t have enough cash on hand.”
On the north shore of Lake Superior, the Lake Superior Grand Portage Band also accepts cash and checks only at its casino, convenience store and business post office for about six hours on the last Friday of the busy summer tourism season. Season.
“We’re pretty much dead in the water here,” said chairman Robert Deschamps, adding that the band is working to determine how much business could be lost.
The local hospital was unable to send the radiology images to physicians in the Twin Cities for review, said Kimber Walstad, administrator of Cook County North Shore Hospital.
And while Cook County’s 911 service remains operational, few people are able to call it, because cell phone service has been cut off, along with voice Internet providers for homes and businesses that use that technology for phone service.
That became a problem at Johnson’s Food, Muus said, when some people got into a heated argument in the parking lot.
“And they wanted me to call the sheriff and they said, ‘Well, the landlines are down. The mobile phones are lost [the] Internet’s down.'” He told them he couldn’t do anything. “Just a lot of headaches that day.”
‘horrible thing’
Google Earth app screenshot Grand Marais, Minn.
Courtesy of Google Earth
Those headaches began at 11:19 a.m. Friday, when a company installing underground cable three miles north of Silver Bay accidentally severed the main fiber optic trunk line from Duluth to the North Shore.
That line is the Northeast Service Cooperative, or NESC, a nonprofit public corporation created by the state legislature that operates a 1,200-mile fiber optic network across northeastern Minnesota.
John Loughen, who oversees the NESC network, said it was still unclear who cut the line. What is clear is that no one broke the law by failing to properly notify Gopher State One of their plans to drill in the area.
“This is a major artery for the network, so it was a terrible place to hit,” Loffen said.
And that fiber optic line doesn’t just provide Internet access. It provides fiber connectivity between cell towers and carriers such as AT&T and Verizon. So when the line went down on Friday, so did mobile service.
“If there’s a hurricane, or some kind of major disaster, and people can’t report right away … I mean, time is of the essence in these situations,” said Grand Marais Mayor Jay DeCow. “So it’s really scary.”
DeCoux, who manages emergency communications for Cook County, said he and other local officials are putting pressure on the NESC and other entities to prevent something like this from happening again.
“Because of the background knowledge of how the system works, this didn’t have to happen,” Decoux said. “We’re really lucky.”
For years, there was only one fiber optic line connecting the North Shore to the Duluth area. Any disruption of that line often leads to extensive amputations.
A few years ago, NESC installed a second line with redundancy built in, so that if one line goes down, traffic can be instantly diverted to the other line.
But this incident exposed holes in the system. A fiber line a few kilometers north of Silver Bay was cut “in an area where that frequency wasn’t built on that particular section,” Loffen said.
It took about six hours for most Internet and cell phone service to switch to that odd line. But it took about 24 hours for AT&T to restore service, DeCoux said.
NESC is now planning to install more equipment and set up network links to the North Shore.
He said the goal is to complete that work in less than a month.
Crash sets
Cook County, at the northeastern tip of Minnesota’s Arrowhead region, is used to using interceptors.
911 service is often down, so the county has established a perimeter with its nine volunteer fire departments, which serve as hubs for people to call for emergency services.
Wildfires and storms along the Gunflint Trail have caused power and phone outages that sometimes last for weeks.
That’s why Mike Prohm, CEO of Voyager Brewing Co. in Grand Marais, created a “crash kit” where employees train twice a year for Internet or power outages.
Includes instructions for manually calculating various tax rates and old-fashioned guest checks with carbon copy receipts.
During last week’s outage, Prom said many customers didn’t want to give out their phone numbers in case there was a problem with their credit cards. But he said most people were glad it stayed open.
We’re a little more tolerant of where we live and you know that’s why we live where we live, it’s a wilderness landscape to be here.
“It’s one of the vulnerabilities we have where we are,” said Sarah McManus, CEO of Arrowhead Cooperative, which provides broadband Internet service to 3,500 customers throughout Cook County.
“The people here are incredibly patient and incredibly patient. We are very grateful for their grace as we do this work.
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