Spectrum Teams Make Progress Restoring Service After Southern California Wildfires

Recovery efforts are underway after destructive wildfires raged for weeks across Southern California. In the hardest hit areas, ash and rubble dominate the landscape where thousands of structures were destroyed or damaged due to the Palisades and Eaton fires, impacting residents in Altadena, Malibu, Pacific Palisades and their surrounding areas.

As thousands of families who were forced to evacuate are now returning home, our crews are bringing customers in fire zones back online as quickly as possible. Services have already been restored for most of our customers outside of fire zones who lost power in preventative outages designed to lower the risk of additional wildfires.

Hundreds of Field Operations employees and contractors, including Construction, Fiber and Maintenance crews, are actively working in the impacted areas. Infrastructure assessments in limited areas began within two days of the fires starting, and as safety restrictions were gradually lifted, we were permitted to deploy additional personnel each day into the major fire-impacted zones.

Teams have completed construction of more than 30 miles of fiber and coax plant to date, reconnecting thousands of homes and businesses. In heavily impacted areas, where poles and underground fiber were completely destroyed, crews implemented temporary solutions to restore critical services expediently, including Fire Department Stations 23 and 69 in Pacific Palisades and the Altadena Sheriff’s station.

Mario Jaurez, Construction Coordinator, was part of the team that placed thousands of feet of temporary fiber to restore service for the fire stations. “We traced our fiber to pole systems which were completely devastated,” he said. “To bring service back to the stations quickly, we rerouted fiber lines onto different poles and placed temporary fiber near the Pacific Coast Highway.”  

While significant progress has been made, fully rebuilding permanent infrastructure will take time, particularly in the hardest hit areas, and will depend on the extent of the damage and accessibility.

“We have a long road to go in the recovery efforts of our system, and I’m extremely proud of our teams who have stepped up to deliver both immediate and long-term solutions for restoring services for our customers,” said Wally Bakare, Spectrum Regional Vice President, West.

More on Spectrum’s efforts to keep customers and communities connected can be found here.