In article , "Jim Hampton"
writes:

Sure, the cell phone towers have batteries. They're likely fine for a
number of hours of outage - but Gouverneur had no power for over two weeks.
Those batteries aren't designed to last for weeks of drain without recharge.
In this country, an engineer could well be fired for overdesigning something
(that costs money).

Right, those darn engineers are the cause of all the problems!

Likewise, those batteries are there to keep things
working for a *short* power outage. It would cost too much to design those
cell towers to run on batteries for weeks on end with no recharging in that
period. It probably wouldn't have mattered much anyways as the conventional
phone lines were out too - and cell phones are wireless only between the
user and the tower. BTW, unless you had your own generator and were on
two-way satellite internet, you wouldn't have the internet either.

You don't have a motor-generator set for emergency power?!?

Gosh and golly, aren't all radio amateurs "emergency minutemen,"
ready to leap in and save the day with ham radio?

I've been told that...

LHA / WMD