High winds today brought down trees and power lines throughout Concord. I had to take a significant detour while returning from a consulting gig as the main road through downtown was completely blocked. When I arrived, the power was out in our neighborhood, but not at our house, where our backup battery system was online. As is always the case, our municipal power company had electrical service restored in short order, just over twenty minutes. The story was not as rosy for our fiber optic broadband service, which was out of commission for more than 30 hours after the top of a utility pole snapped off (pictured above). The repair required a new pole and the replacement of 700 feet of 96-strand fiber.