How are things in Santa Cruz? Thanks for asking.

The ongoing COVID health crisis was augmented two weeks ago by extremely hot weather that kicked off sudden county-wide power blackouts.

While we were coping with the unusual heat, and worrying about whether more blackouts would come, Santa Cruz County had a pre-dawn lightning storm of terrific force on August 16th. Hundreds of lightning strikes dotted our county, from over the bay to our inland forested mountains. It was beautiful and scary.

We were, it turned out, right to be scared because the lightning set off a number of fires deep in wooded areas. The fires quickly spread in the hot, dry weather and 77,000 people were evacuated as tens of thousands of square acres burned out of control over the next couple of days.

The lightning storms hadn’t just hit Santa Cruz County. The rest of California suffered, too. Fires were started up and down the state — over 600 wildfires in all. It was impossible to address so many fires at once. The state’s resources were stretched thin. As the fires spread, residents were forced to leave their homes.

Evacuees included several Cruzio staffers, and hundreds of our customers. And it appears that some members of the Cruzio community lost their homes.

Those of us who remained in the unevacuated parts of Santa Cruz breathed air full of ash particles, and our homes smelled like smoke. Friends and family from the mountains are still sleeping on our couches, and we have our go-bags ready in case the wind takes a bad turn and we all have to — as the official notices put it — “get out.”

Through all this, we’ve still had to maintain social-distancing, mask-wearing, and generally care due to the pandemic.

So that’s how this month is going.

At Cruzio, we’re constantly reminded, during difficult times, how vital internet service is. Times of crisis raise the need. We had to anticipate damage from the fire and figure out how to prevent damage to our infrastructure. We knew people needed to pore over fire maps and get notices via email.

This means that all Cruzio staff were on alert this week, some losing days of sleep as we monitored and reacted to searing heat, power outages, and fire. Our staff lives here — as do our customers — and we’re fiercely dedicated to successful and safe outcomes for our community. We may suffer glitches and partial outages when the situation becomes overwhelming, but we are not complacent. We fight tooth and nail to keep our services running.

We don’t have to look far for inspiration. The firefighters battling this new and impossible complex of blazes are our heroes and we’re doing whatever we can to help them, as well as people who’ve gone to local shelters, and all those working in the systems which have to kick into place at times like these. Cruzio’s backbone connections are supporting the Santa Cruz Civic and Watsonville Fairgrounds evacuation sites. We’ve provided cameras for fire watch sites. We’ve reached out to government offices all over the county: what can Cruzio do to help?

Meanwhile we’re supporting our staff as best we can. We won’t put them in perilous situations. We try to help those who’ve been evacuated from their homes. Cruzio is focused on keeping internet running, which is a big job, while understanding that we, too, are humans who need a place to sleep.

As the days tick by, Cruzio is ready to help. A team like ours is part of a strong, resilient community, and we are working with organizations around the county to maintain communication services and help people find answers and find each other.  We put our staff’s names at the bottom of every newsletter — we’re proud of their work, especially now, especially this month.

Stay safe, Santa Cruz. Stay strong, it’s up to us to get our neighbors through this tough time.

Cruzio’s team roams Santa Cruz County, putting up and maintaining communications infrastructure. We’re often in high places: on rooftops or mountain peaks, and we had great views of the thing that’s been hovering above us for the last several days: the smoke-filled sky.

Cruzio has a lot of talented photographers on staff, and they posted photos of what they were seeing.

What Started the Fires

A lightning storm before dawn on Sunday, August 16th. Santa Cruz almost never gets lightning, but that night was wild. The storm was accompanied by little or no rain.

From a weather app, Sunday, August 16th, 4:26 am.

From Above

From high up where some of Cruzio’s facilities are located, we can see big changes occurring when the wind shifts and fire kicks up. First a trail of smoke rises, then the hills are laid over with creeping grey, and then, sometimes, the wind changes and skies are blue again.

Monday mountaintop:

View from Loma Prieta, Monday August 17th, 2020. Photo by John Beardwood.

Wednesday mountaintop:

View from Loma Prieta, Monday August 17th, 2020. Photo by John Beardwood.

View from Loma Prieta Mountain, Weds August 19th. Photo by Cameron Kennedy.

View from Loma Prieta Mountain, Weds August 19th. Photo by Cameron Kennedy.

Friday mountaintop:

Looking towards Gilroy Friday, August 19th, 2020. Alison Lowenthal.

Looking towards Gilroy Friday, August 19th, 2020. Photo by Alison Lowenthal.

Note: the skies were blue on Friday, but that’s because the wind was favorable to that particular mountaintop that morning. Conditions are still shifting, and blue skies often give way to overhead smoke.

 

Around Santa Cruz County

When Cruzio staff are driving around town, it’s been almost eerie. As Field Operations staffer Sonya says “I said it before and I’ll say it again, It looks like an apocalypse movie.”

In the last week, the sky has gone from grey-yellow to various shades of orange, with occasional spots of blue peering through. The sun? A glowering red circle.

When the sky was orange

 

West Side Santa Cruz Weds, August 19th, 2020. Photo by Sonya Campbell.

 

On a roof. West Side Santa Cruz Weds, August 19th, 2020. Photo by Sonya Campbell.

Laurel Street, Santa Cruz, Wednesday, August 19th, 2020. Photo by Hans Morales.

East Side Santa Cruz, Wednesday, August 19th, 2020. Photo by Mark Hanford.

 

Monterey Bay from West Cliff Drive, Weds, August 19th, 2020. Photo by Peggy Dolgenos.

 

“Mood,” Wednesday, August 19th, 2020. Photo by Jason Smidt.

 

877 Cedar Street, Thursday, August 20th, 2020. Photo by Evan Powers.

 

When the sky was grey

 

Rooftop, Santa Cruz, Thursday August 20th, 2020. Photo by Cameron Kennedy.

First photo, Capitola, Friday August 21st, 2020. Photo by Evan Powers.

Five minutes later, much worse. Capitola, Friday August 21st, 2020. Photo by Evan Powers.

Air quality on Friday, August 21st, 2020. Photo by Jason Smidt.

 

Our Trucks in Many Places

Our staff has traveled all around the county and up into the Bay Area when necessary to maintain and repair equipment. Cruzio staff have uploaded some photos of our heroic trucks looking out over a smoke- and fire-colored landscape.

Cruzio’s truck on Loma Prieta, Weds, August 19th, 2020. Photo by Cameron Kennedy.

Cruzio truck on Bay Street, Thursday, August 20th, 2020. Photo by Sonya Campbell.

 

Why Communications Can Sometimes be Difficult

And here’s a picture from a security camera on a communications tower in Bonny Doon, as the tower was engulfed by fire and destroyed.

We all need to do our part in making the world a better place. And Cruzio’s part centers around the internet. That’s why we’re joining many other companies to halt all paid advertising on Facebook for the month of July, in a campaign tagged #StopHateforProfit.

Facebook has been allowing people to publish hate speech, inaccuracies, and doctored videos. They’re not unique in that, but the impact is greatest on Facebook and there’s been little effective response from the company. As an early internet provider, Cruzio feels responsible when things go wrong online. We can’t control the internet, but we can try to make it a healthier, more equitable place.

Cruzio urges all our users to be thoughtful when they publish online. We don’t think everyone who works for Facebook or posts on Facebook is culpable, and the platform has many benefits. By joining a boycott, we hope to move their corporate policies in the right direction.

It never fails: every crisis brings out the scammers.

What Cruzio, as an ISP,  particularly wants to warn you about is the email scammers, who send “phishing” email. They pretend to be your bank, your ISP, your neighbor. They pretend they’re collecting money for charity — which people are more inclined to give in troubled times. They prey on your most shameful secrets and your greediest dreams of undeserved wealth.

When there’s something on your mind, like the fact that you can’t leave your home and go about your normal life, you’re a little more susceptible. Older people, especially, may be home alone and less clued into the vast possibilities of digital deception.

So be on guard, and help your family and friends.

What We’re Seeing

Lately, Cruzio has seen some pretty convincing fakes supposedly coming from… us! The scammers scoop up a Cruzio graphic and pop it atop a serious-sounding message telling you to type your password and personal information into a website.

Don’t.

Don’t type it in unless you’re sure. If you’re not sure the message is from us (or your bank, or your insurance company — even more frequent targets), don’t download files or visit websites. Don’t answer if someone says they have evidence that you looked at a porn site. If they seem to know a password, change it on the real site, not by clicking a link in the email.

(By the way, personal information including passwords has been harvested in various hacking incidents affecting institutions and businesses like the Veteran’s Administration, Target, Equifax, etc. To see if your information is available to scammers on the internet, check haveibeenpwned.com.)

And if an email sounds dire, remember that the more urgent the email sounds, the more likely it’s a scam.

Be especially suspicious of any email that says you need to “verify” your account by typing in information the company should already have or which they shouldn’t need, like your social security number.

Cruzio Gets Phony Sites Down Quickly

For our part, Cruzio is on the lookout, Most phishing schemes are caught before they even get to customers’ mailboxes. Scams that do get through are escalated quickly and our specialized team takes action immediately to report and disable the link. Crooks love to operate on holidays and weekends, so our pager team — who’s on call 24/7 — has been extra busy foiling phishermen during the pandemic.

Because we act quickly to foil the phishing, even if you click on a link, the scammer’s site has almost always been disabled. The longer you wait, the better the chance the scheme’s been axed.

If we think a lot of people have received the phishing email, we put a message on our voice mail (831 459-6301).

Phony Websites Hide on Infected Computers

What websites harbor these devious plots? Generally the host sites themselves are not criminal ones. They’re innocent victims who’ve been fooled by a similar phishing scheme in the past. The scammers crowbar in and put some web pages deep into their otherwise legit website. Once informed, webmasters shut access to those pages down — very quickly.

So often you’ll see, say, a fake Wells Fargo page deep inside a suburban nail salon website. The small business doesn’t even know it’s there, and will remove it as soon as they’re alerted.

More Information

Because the internet is, unfortunately, rife with misinformation and scams, we’ve written a number of blogs over the years to help customers recognize and respond to spam. Some are linked below.

And the Federal Trade Commission maintains a blog where online privacy and security scams are listed.

James, who is Cruzio’s Director of Operations and Business Development, apparently likes cats. He has three real ones and a number of artistic renderings.

When he sent a cute photo of his cat Molly to a company message board, we noticed more felines in the photo than just Molly. There are many cats in this photo. It took us a while to find them all!

How many cats do you see? After you’ve given it your best shot, check for the answer below.

How many cats are in the photo?

Drag your cursor over the white text below to highlight the answer:

We count eight!:

1/ Molly, the real cat
2/ Red cat figure behind her
3/ Creepy bronze cat peeping out from behind laptop
4/ Gold statue cat # 1 on shelf
5/ Gold statue cat # 2 on shelf
6/ Cruzio kitty on sticker on world’s finest electric pencil sharpener (it’s the sharpener against which other sharpeners are measured. It said so on the box.)
7/ Cruzio kitty on laptop screen on Slack
8/ Name on spine of film encyclopedia: Ephraim KATZ (ooooooh!)

Cruzio thought we might have less activity during shelter-in-place, but we were wrong.

School kids need more internet
Children who used to access the internet from their school or library don’t have access there any more. So Cruzio has added a considerable number of donated accounts to our work. We’re collaborating with the Santa Cruz County Office of Education (COE) to get internet connections to low-income families who need to get their kids online.

If children can’t access the internet, they may fall behind in school, and we can’t let that happen.

We want to give a big shout out to Jason Borgen from the COE, to the Pajaro Valley School District, to individual schools who’ve contacted us, and to the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz, all of whom have been working hard on this. At Cruzio it’s part of our Equal Access Santa Cruz project. And you’re helping too: by being a customer, you’re making it possible for us to extend a hand to neighbors when they need it.

Internet Drive-Ins
But connecting people one home at a time is slow. And some locations are impossible to serve. So Cruzio is supplying internet to “internet drive-ins” around the county. These are parking lots — underused these days — where people can drive up and use high-speed wifi while safely isolated in their cars.

Not Just Students — Everybody Needs Internet
People working and studying at home all day need a lot more internet. Industry reports show that internet use is up 36% around the country. At the same time, business offices are shuttered.

To the extent that Cruzio’s business customers help offset residential accounts, that’s a difficulty. Cruzio is working hard at improving service while at the same time seeing a drop in income.

At the outset of the virus crisis, we set down our priorities:

1. Keep the network running reliably.
2. Continue to employ and pay all existing staff.
3. Extend service to needy people in the county, especially low-income students.
4. Improve service wherever possible, because everybody needs it more.

It’s certainly challenging to work in current conditions. Costs are up, income is down. We’ve had to change plans from buying a new vehicle to repairing our old one. We’re riding all our equipment hard, traveling from one end of the county to another. Our tech support is answering double the calls they did at this time last year. And they’re doing it from their homes, which is an extra complication.

Our field ops crews have developed “no-touch” installations, where we can hook a house up to our faster network without ever going inside. Sure, we miss meeting you, but it’s a very virus-aware option, and we’re happy to do it for your safety and ours.

That’s on top of the regular gloves, masks, and safe distances we’ve been practicing since the beginning. And our managers have been working hard to set up contact tracing. In case any of our employees falls sick with the virus, we will be able to track anyone that person came into close contact with.

We’re Not Even Holding Doors Open for Each Other
We’re thinking of ways to be better at this distancing every day. Chris Frost and James Hackett are our master planners. They have all our crews staying far apart from each other when they have to be at the office — crews are on separate floors of the building, in separate offices, using separate facilities. We’re not even holding the door open for each other. Fresh gloves, surfaces wiped constantly, the whole deal.

The cleaning hasn’t been the hardest part — it’s the isolation. Our crews have always chatted and hung out in the office before leaving for the field and when putting tools away at the end of the day. No one’s complained about the constant wipedowns, but we have had staff mention how much they miss the camaraderie with each other and with customers.

So that’s what it’s like at Cruzio these days. Though we’ll probably all be wearing masks, or waving through a closed window, please know our techs are smiling at you, and saying thanks for being a customer.

PPE in the 1600s. Herbs & salts were stuffed in the beak, and the clothes were coated with wax. Not so different from PPE today, really.

Are we living through a plague?

Medically, no.

A plague, in medical terms, refers to a specific family of illnesses. It’s bacterial, and gets to humans through fleabites. Plague is treatable with antibiotics. It was a terrible scourge for many centuries, but at this point it’s relatively rare.

The novel coronavirus, on the other hand, is not caused by a living organism like a bacterium. Viruses are not alive, and antibiotics don’t kill them. It’s interesting that evolutionary forces work on things that aren’t alive — when they propagate successfully, viruses thrive.

In a non-medical sense we are living through a plague: in plague’s other meaning, as a calamity, a dreadful evil. As in, a plague of locusts, or, to a family member who drinks their coffee too noisily, stop plaguing me.

The Practice of Sheltering Goes Way Back

And though we’re not living through a plague as scientifically defined, we are now practicing measures developed in response to plagues of long, long ago. Though people in the 14th century didn’t know what air was composed of — or if it was composed of anything at all — and had no way of seeing tiny particles like bacteria or viruses, they could tell that the Black Death spread from person to person, ship to shore, house to house. So they made efforts to isolate people, as we’re doing now.

14th century Venetians invented quarantine — our word is taken from an Italian phrase, quaranta giorni, meaning forty days. They suffered much more than we are now: Discover Magazine quotes archaeologists who say that on a quarantine island outside Venice, hundreds of bodies were apparently buried on top of each other in layers, “like lasagna.”

Like modern sufferers, Venetian and other governments had problems telling who was sick in time to sequester them. They didn’t have tests, either. And so, like now, authorities often confined the well with the sick.

As Does Our Lack of Mobility

Halting mobility to stop the spread of a disease, another practice recently (and sporadically, through the centuries) revived from the Renaissance era, is called cordon sanitaire. Perhaps the most famous example is from 1665, when a small village in England called Eyam imposed a travel restriction on itself and probably saved thousands of lives in surrounding areas, though 3/4 of its own population died of the plague.

Their cordon sanitaire was used as a firebreak — a wall preventing disease from marching across a country. Our current “shelter in place” is doing the same thing, county by county but also house by house. By walling ourselves off from contact, each of us is sparing our neighbors from possible infection.

It’s not the plague. But in many ways, we are living with some of the same effects.

We’ve found another eagle nest streaming live on the internet, and this one is really interesting.

Eagles, like most raptors, mate for life. From Missouri, Audobon.org reports a lovely story of a pair of male eagles raising a family together, first with one female and then another:

“In 2012, when the original pair—Valor I (male) and Hope (female)—began nesting at Lock and Dam 13 on the Mississippi River, Valor I wasn’t a very good partner or father. He was irresponsible about incubating the eggs and feeding the eaglets, which were really his only two jobs.”

The young eagle couple’s first-year eggs hatched, but the eaglets weren’t able to survive the neglect, and died before fledging.

They Needed a Second Dad

Audobon.org continues: “Valor I’s lack of commitment and knowhow was impeding the couple’s ability to successfully reproduce. Then, as if in response to their struggles, a second male, subsequently named Valor II, showed up on the refuge webcam in the fall of 2013. At first, he kept his distance, perching on the edge of the nest or a nearby branch. Before long, though, he appeared to usurp Valor I as Hope’s main partner…. Valor I didn’t seem to mind. He stayed near the nest and wasn’t seen contributing to egg-incubation or eaglet-raising. ‘He was still around but not actively involved,’ Pam Steinhaus, the Visitor Services Manager says. Two eaglets successfully fledged that year.”

Over the next few years, the trio stayed together. Valor I, the original bad dad, gradually took an interest in the nest and became what we might refer to as a stand-up dude. The two dads shared full nest duties with Hope and could be seen on camera feeding and caring for the eaglets. The eagle parents each had their strengths.

“‘The boys would put sticks in the nest, but they never put them in the right spot,’ Steinhaus says. ‘Hope was always replacing sticks in the spots where she wanted them to go.'” And by the way, even though their nests looks pretty ramshackle, eagles do seem to spend a lot of time neatening up.

The threesome coparented for several years.

Then, Tragedy. But Wait…

But sadly, in a series of attacks on their nest by neighboring eagles in 2017, Hope was apparently killed. (Not to get judgmental about wildlife, but those other eagles seem horrid.) The two dads, Valor I and Valor II, continued to defend and care for the nest. They raised the eaglets successfully without their mate.

And Valor I and Valor II stayed together as a couple. They were joined by new female named Starr later in 2017 and the three have been raising eaglets every year since. There are two eaglets in their nest right now, about a month old and looking pretty teenage-gawky — you can see them on live stream cameras.

Our friendly front desk is closed for the duration of the shelter in place. Seemed like a good time to remind everyone that, if you need to make any changes to your account or pay your bill, our spiffy account portal allows you to do all that from the comfort of your favorite chair.

How, you ask?

1/ Head over to myaccount.cruzio.com or go to Cruzio.com and click the little credit card icon on the upper right. Next to the envelope. To the left of ‘Contact Us’. Above the Search bar. You’ll see it.

2/ Once you’re there, click ‘Login’ in the upper-left corner.

3/ If you’ve been here before and by some miracle remember your login and password, enter them and click ‘login’. If you remembered them right, you’re in. Jump ahead to item 5.

If you don’t have a login or don’t remember, what’s next has a couple of steps. That’s annoying, but two things: One, it’s really not that bad, just a few steps. And two, it’s all to protect your account. Good protection has to put up barriers. And you only need to do it once. Now, on to the next steps…

4a/ If you don’t know your login, click the link on the right that reads, “request new login credentials via email by clicking here.” Then enter the email address associated with your account and we’ll email that address right away with a reset code. The email will have the subject line, “Login ID Reset Request” and contain a six digit code.

Enter that code, a login ID of your choice and a password into the form you’re directed to and click ’submit’. Passwords must be 7+ characters in length and must include: one number, one special character, and upper or lower case alphabetic characters. We know, right? If your password doesn’t check all those boxes, you’ll get an error in obnoxious red text. Try again.

Once you’re in, skip on down to item 5.

(If you get a different error in obnoxious red text saying ‘DuplicateLoginID’, that means you actually have been here before and that login already exists. Either create a new login or go back to the main login screen and follow the link to reset password. You can create a new login using the same email address.)

4b/To reset your password, from the login screen, click where it says, “Forgot your password? If so request a new one via email by clicking here.”. Enter your login id and you’ll receive an email very similar to the new ID request email, with another six digit code. Enter that code in the form and pick a new password. You’ll automatically be logged in.

5/ Once you’re logged in you’ll see links to view any saved payment methods, make a payment or look at your bill. 

6/ To pay your bill click ‘make payment’, choose the payment method, enter the payment amount and hit ’make payment’.

You’re done. You’ll get a receipt via email. Thanks for supporting local, independent broadband.