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Storms' Fury Cut Off Data Lines That Bind
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Tony Welz, principal of Welz & Weisel Communications, a public relations firm in Fairfax, arrived at his office Thursday morning to find everything disconnected. But his firm was to host an event for 100 people that night, and he couldn't afford to lose any work time. His 10-person staff ended up hunkering down all day -- with a few tables, power strips and a WiFi connection -- in the lobby of the Tower Club in Tysons Corner, where the event was.
"We're extremely dependent on our phones and the Web, but luckily, you can usually find a place that's still up and running," Welz said. "If nothing else, you can find a Panera Bread with WiFi."
Like many students and workers in the Washington region, Jacob Rasch relies on the Internet as a research tool. "I knew the Compromise of 1877 was between Samuel J. Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes, but I was trying to find out the exact parts of the deal, why it was done," said the Thomas W. Pyle Middle School scholar and student body president. "I wanted to look it up. I couldn't."
What about an encyclopedia? "That's so 20th century," said the 13-year-old. "We don't have any encyclopedias to look it up. We just use online Encyclopedia Britannica."
Likewise, his brother Jonathan, 10, had a math test this week and thought he might need to know the surface area of a cone. He was stumped, he said, without Google.
On Wednesday night, the boys wanted to know whether school would be open Thursday. But the notice was online.
"So we had to check out whether or not we had school by phone, at 6:35" in the morning, Jacob said. What's wrong with that? "It's so technologically not advanced."
Louise Branson was still living with the storm's aftermath yesterday. The Vienna resident, who works as an editorial writer for USA Today, usually does her banking online every Friday. It's also the day when she usually calls her mother, who lives in England, by Skype, a service that routes calls over the Internet.
Branson's Verizon FiOS connection, which includes phone, cable and Internet service, was out. Her son, Nick Doder, a sophomore at James Madison High School in Vienna, could not log on Wednesday or Thursday nights to work on a big AP history group project due next week. The task, to predict future socioeconomic conditions around the world, requires a great deal of online research.
"Normally, we'd just send e-mails to each other, but because we didn't have Internet access, we had to stay after school for an extra two hours," Doder said by cellphone.
While some Washingtonians clung to their cellphones and BlackBerrys as their lifelines, the dependence was short-lived. Batteries quickly died.
Jacob Rasch's cellphone has a slow, basic connection to the Internet. It was not fast enough for him to check his favorite sites, ESPN.com and MLB.com, for baseball scores. Without the Web and his Nintendo Wii, Jacob was forced this week to do something he was not used to doing.
"Our only news source was -- get this -- the newspaper," he said. "I always read the sports section. But this time, I was forced to read outside my boundaries. The news!"
Staff writer Cecilia Kang contributed to this report.
