Cambium, Mikrotik, Netonix survive hurricane Florence flooding

Products ePMP
1

I am located on the NC/SC border and in one of the areas that experienced significant flooding. My office had over 2 feet of water in it, and an old broadcast tower we acquired whose radio "shack" houses our networking equipment for that tower had 4 feet of water in it. 

At my office we had 2 4 packs of Force 200's, another box with 4 cnPilot R190v routers and some ePMP 1000I's sitting on the floor. They had come in days before the hurricane and we did not get them on shelves for the fact we were out prepping our Motorola customers sites. The boxes and devices were all submerged in water. 

At the broadcast tower, which is about 2 miles from my office, we had a Mikrotik router and Netonix switch running 1 backhaul and 4 AP's. Both were powered by a Tycon DC power supply/battery charger. Router, switch, and charger were submerged underwater while having battery power applied. By the time we could reach the radio "shack", AC powered had been restored and I just knew we definitely had fried equipment. All three devices were powered and lit up when I entered the "shack". I removed AC power and started taking units out of the rack. Water was dripping out of each. 

I took all the equipment from my office and tower home (could not work at office as it was a disaster). Laid it out on back porch (sun was out nice and hot by then) let it all dry that day and the next. Hooked each unit up one by one and EVERYTHING worked. I had already programmed back up equipment and installed it at the tower site. A few days later, I went and put original networking equipment back into the radio "shack". Has been working for a few weeks now like a charm. 

The drowned Force 200's were used to replace units that were damaged at customer locations during the hurricane. They are ALL working fine.We have used 1 of the R190v's at a new install location as well.

Oh yea, at one customers location we had a ePMP 1000i mounted 60 feet in a tree. The entire tree came down. By the time we got there to replace it the owner had cut tree up. He left one 3 foot section laying out with the 1000i still mounted. We powered that unit up and tested it. It worked fine, so we reinstalled it and it is also still running great. 

We have a total of 8 Ubiquiti devices in our network. We use them for very short links. Out of those 8 none were physically damaged. But.... we did have one Litebeam M5 whose ethernet port died and had to be replaced. Not that good when you compare it to the drowning the Cambium, Mikrotik, and Netonix gear took. 

2

That's impressive.   We had a tornado a couple of month ago (Oklahoma) that did quite a bit of damage to our small town.  After the storm, one of our customers on 2.4 epmp 1000 had a degraded signal but was still on the air.  We assumed the high winds had shifted something.  When we went to the location the next day we found a large limb had broken from a tree, knocked the j-mount loose from the roof and entangled the cable in the limb.  The epmp  unit was at the eave of the house, hanging upside down from the limb and water had run down the cable inside.  It was just by chance still mostly pointed at the tower and worked throughout the event.  Customer had the limb removed, we dried it out, put a new end on the cable and reinstalled it.  Still working fine 4 months later.

3

We have units on masts out the top of large pine trees. Some of the mast were folded over 180 degrees (aimed back down toward ground). Most of these units had water make it to the ethernet port. Some had dielectric grease in the ports and some did not. Most fried the rj45 and the ethernet port prongs. A few of these we were able to clean up the ethernet port prongs, install new rj45's, throw on some dielectric grease and we were back in business.