Storms' Fury Cut Off Data Lines That Bind
In a Flash, Web Users Felt Disconnected

By Kim Hart and Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, June 7, 2008; A01

Bethesda eighth-grader Jacob Rasch could not do his history homework assignment on the Compromise of 1877 on Thursday because, he said, he couldn't look it up on Wikipedia.

His mother could not e-mail health forms so Jacob can play baseball in high school this fall because severe thunderstorms that rolled through the Washington region this week took down the family's power and their Internet connection.

And his father couldn't fix the generator outside the house because he couldn't visit HowTo.com to find out how to clean the carburetor so that the generator would spring to life and power, among other things, the wireless router to their computer network.

So the Rasch family packed a laptop Thursday evening and moved to a hotel, where they could log on and feel plugged in.

"We couldn't connect to the outside world without the power and the Internet," Jacob Rasch said. "We had no idea what was going on."

It's one thing to be without power. It's another to be without information.

The storms that pummeled the region this week didn't just knock out the lights in hundreds of thousands of homes. They also made people realize how dependent they have become on the Internet, how much checking e-mail, banking online and using search engines have become woven into the daily rhythms of their lives.

In the District, 58 percent of households use a high-speed Internet connection from a cable modem, DSL or fiber connection, or wireless service, according to the Federal Communications Commission and the Census Bureau. About 35 percent of all Virginia households and 39 percent of Maryland homes are highly wired. The percentages in the D.C. suburbs are probably higher than the statewide figures, but the FCC does not sort users by metropolitan areas.

About 500,000 households and businesses in the Washington area went without power after Wednesday's storm, which killed one person and damaged a number of homes and cars. Some households had electricity but no Internet, phone or cable service because the fiber and cable lines were damaged by fallen trees or flooding. Most of the 1.1 million people who rely on Comcast's high-speed Internet service were affected by the storm, said Jaye Linnen, a Comcast spokeswoman. Many of Verizon's 1 million customers also were disconnected when they could not power their modems, as well as 56,000 Cox subscribers. Service had been restored yesterday to all but a few thousand customers, the companies said.

But unplugged telecommuters had to find fast alternatives to meet work deadlines and reach clients.

Elise Gibbons, a Web designer, had to get a digital photo to a client by Thursday night. Her home office lost power and DSL service Wednesday, but her land line still worked. So she dug through boxes in her basement to find a dial-up modem, circa 1998. She finally got a connection, but it took two hours for her e-mail to get through. Yesterday she drove to New Jersey to make sure her client received the file properly.

"You don't realize how much you depend on it until you lose it," said Gibbons, whose Greenbelt home was still dark yesterday evening.

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.