Stuff I've seen at work since Helene.

It's easy for a lineman to forget that he's hauling a 40ft long utility pole on his bucket truck.

The ground wire failed on this utility pole.

People got desperate to get their internet back.

"Just find your tone and splice in." This is old school internet. DSL to be exact. It's also something called POTS. (Plain Old Telephone Service.)

I bet the power company got a kick out of this one.

My kittens. Sidewinder and Hellfire (Their mother is nicknamed "Missy." Her name at the vet is registered as MISSILE LAUNCHER.)

What's left of the DSL cable that gave 800 people their internet service.

Believe it or not, kids, the internet actually looked like this, before 9/11.

Ultra zoomed in, but this white oak was nearly 200ft long.

Now THIS shit is cool! This is called 2400 pair CO Cable. This is old school phone service inside the main data building. Your parents landlines used to connect to this. Some of us older folks connected to AOL on cables like this.

This is the same CO cable, but distrubuted to 10 different feeder cables of 240 pair each. These would go to cabinets called "Cross Boxes" across every city in america. (that image was a little bit further up with the orange and white knobs).

Those cross boxes would feed terminals up and down the neighborhood, and the customers would connect from the terminals to their house.

This is the manufacturing stamp of that 2400 pair cable. July 1973.

This is an unintentional demonstration of what a terminal looks like. The white strip at the bottom of the pic is what phone wires tie into in order to bring dial tone inside the house.

A bucket truck that I saw at a rest area while I was between work orders.

The amount of copper wire I've had to salvage from repairs per day. That really fancy orderly looking stuff at the bottom is fiber optic line.

A bonus for making it this far

"I shall not fear. Fear is the mind killer." -this utility lineman

The only resident I could find who didn't know about the hurricane.

The day of. I knew this storm was gonna wreck us.

These guys are saviors. No wonder Lineman are cocky and arrogant and bullheaded.

Fiber terminal. Multigig to be exact. This does not look good from any house. Fiber is made of glass. Glass doesn't bend like that.

5g tower. Doesn't even run LTE speeds. (Just kidding. The power was cut to it immediately before it started irradiating the ground in a 50ft radius and turning the frogs gay.)

They had spare adamantium after making wolverines skeleton and decided to use the surplus to make these dudes testicles.

A fiber optic case. It's supposed to be in the air. It's lif is supposed to be sealed too.

Our local amphitheater. The fence behind the canopy is where the river is supposed to stop.

We really had no idea what hit us. It's been three weeks and we're still finding wild stuff.

These were taken by a friend of mine with a super fancy camera.

What's left of city hall

What's left of a rail bridge that has seen service since 1840.

We had no idea what hit us. It was only a category 2.

This is the local Riverwalk. There aren't any trees at our local Riverwalk. There have never been trees at our local Riverwalk.

There are where the trees are supposed to be.

It's an extra. I know. Yall probably didn't make it this far anyway. I'm gonna stop typing now. Enjoy the rest of the album