Hurricane Zeta continued its march up the southeast Thursday as a tropical storm, bringing flooding to parts of the Carolinas and Virginia. It made landfall late Wednesday in southeastern Louisiana as a Category 2 hurricane with sustained winds of 110 miles per hour and a significant storm surge. It’s the fifth named storm to hit Louisiana this year, reported NPR.
Storm surge also swamped parts of Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, according to the Associated Press. Trees fell and snapped utility lines, causing power outages across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, according to the website PowerOutage.us.
The FCC’s first Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS) report for Zeta came out Thursday. Overall, just over 10 percent of the cell sites in the total impacted states were non-operational yesterday.
Georgia had the most cell sites out as of mid-morning. Of a total 6,186 cell sites in 40 impacted counties, 606 (9.8 percent) were not working. 253 were damaged, 191 had data transport issues to and from the tower and 161 had no power. Fulton County had the most outages – 301 out of 1,588 sites. 156 had data transport problems, 86 had no power and 59 were damaged.
Cobb County had the second-highest cell site outages, with 68 (10.9 percent) out of 625 non-operational sites. 31 were damaged, 24 had no power and 13 had data transport issues.
23 Louisiana parishes were impacted by Zeta. Of the 2,358 cell sites in the impacted areas, 378 (16 percent) were out. 251 had no power, 76 were damaged and 35 had data transport problems.
In Alabama, 416 (8.8 percent) out of 4,746 cell sites were out. Mississippi saw 134 cell sites (10 percent) not working out of 1,342.
Cable and wireline companies reported 362,327 subscribers out of service in the affected areas; this may include the loss of telephone, television, and/or internet services. No TV stations nor AMs were off the air. Three FMs were dark.
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