Company will also apply four-day mandatory evacuation credit automatically
Many of Cox Cable’s St. Charles Parish customers were pleasantly surprised when their TV’s and internet were back in action soon after their power was restored. Storm repairs ran smoothly unlike the aftermath of Katrina when many customers went without cable for weeks.
Nearly all customers in St. Charles Parish now have cable, and some never lost it during Hurricane Gustav, according to Cox Communications spokesman Brad Grundmeyer.
Anyone still without cable is urged to go ahead and make a service call.
“If someone still doesn’t have cable in St. Charles Parish at this point, I recommend that they call us and set up a trouble call,” Grundmeyer said. “It could be due to a downed poll and I know Entergy is working on a lot of those in Luling. But 100 percent of our system was up and running on the East Bank on Sept. 9 and 98.9 percent of the system was up on the West Bank.”
Grundmeyer says that Cox has a robust network and the company was able to relocate their assets out of harms way in preparation for re-entry after the storm. On Sept. 1, there were more than 75 Cox trucks on the road to begin repairing the network.
“The network did really well, especially in places in St. Charles Parish where the cable is underground – like Ashton Plantation and Ormond,” Grundmeyer said. “The damage we did get was from wind and fallen debris.”
Though a resident may have power, they still may not have cable yet because Cox’s power supply might not have received power from Entergy.
“Our fiber optic cable requires power because we have to be able to push the signal through the fiber optics,” Grundmeyer said. “The reason why someone’s cable might not be on – even if they have power – is that our power supply may be around the corner, a couple of blocks away from their house or a mile down the road. That power supply may not be powered on yet.”
And while most residents received cable soon after power was restored to their home, Cox is going to apply a four-day mandatory evacuation credit to all of their customers affected by Gustav.
“We are being very proactive with this because we realize that people weren’t able to use their cable services while they were evacuated,” Grundmeyer said. “Our customers don’t even have to call – the credit will show up on their October bill automatically.”
The credit will apply to all monthly services offered by Cox. The credit will not cover services like On Demand or long-distance phone calls.
“Additionally, our service outage report will allow us to assess if anyone requires additional credit for a longer outage,” Grundmeyer said.
All Cox asks in return is that those citizens who receive their utilities and cable underground avoid placing debris or trash on the company’s green cable pedestals found between homes near the curb.
“Those are critical to our network and after Katrina we had people stacking up debris on those and the front loader of the debris trucks would just rip the pedestal out,” Grundmeyer said. “We had more post-Katrina damage due to that one issue alone than we did during Katrina.”
For residential customer care, call 504-304-8444. Businesses should call 504-304-1700.
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