Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Signal Loss

I'm going to try to post when I can, but we're in a bad situation here. As I said yesterday, there's a lot of damage around the compound to take care of, the wall first and most important. We're very fortunate that the rain continued on last night since it kept to many zombies from getting near the wall and seeing how easy it would have been for them to force a breach. We've had people working nonstop to patch and repair, and my brother is working with a group of folks right now to get new panels and boards made for the damaged parts.

It's a lot of work, but nothing I haven't had to organize before. I even offered to help by going out and working myself, but I was shot down. I was told that there had to be someone to run the show, to act as a go-between for all the different groups of people working to make this place whole again. It isn't as wonderful as it sounds. I basically just report what I'm told and allocate men and materials where we need them.

The repairs to the compound are actually proceeding pretty well. That's not why I might not be able to post consistently over the next few days. The problem there is that the cell tower just down the road has been losing signal strength. I've talked to some of the folks at Google and a few engineers in North Jackson, and they're working on theories. The first few responses I got from them seemed to imply that at first glance it was just a power issue.

Which would be about the best scenario we could hope for. Since that cell tower was built to serve as an emergency backup for communication during disasters where the power grid failed, it's been running on the minimal power that the backup systems provide for a while now. We've got solar panels and spare turbines to use if needed, but that will have to wait until we get some kind of response from the people who know more about it than I do.

If the problem is something more complicated, we might be in trouble. No one here has the level of technical expertise needed to repair electronics that sophisticated. At least, I don't think so. Let's all cross our fingers and hope that the solar cells that run the tower are just misaligned or something. I don't want to think about being stuck without even minimal communication with the outside.

OK, I'm getting back to work now. My brother apparently needs me to talk to the council soon to see if he can go ahead and dig one of those trenches I talked about last week outside of the western wall. He thinks it will keep the zombies at bay while we get the repairs done and reinforced. Sounds like a good idea to me...

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