April Hazard-of-the-Month

Avestor Battery

In an article by Phil Harvey of Light Reading dated January 15, 2008, he writes;

After four equipment fires (and 2 explosions) in two years, including a Christmas Day 2007 explosion in Wisconsin, AT&T Inc. says it is no longer comfortable with the batteries powering thousands of its equipment cabinets in neighborhoods all over the U.S.

"Following incidents involving batteries used in AT&T U-verse network cabinets, the company is replacing 17,000 similar batteries, all manufactured by Avestor," writes an AT&T spokesman, in an e-mail to Light Reading (www.lightreading.com). "Normally, we would work with a vendor to diagnose problems and develop solutions. We can't do that in this case because Avestor filed for bankruptcy in October 2006 (within a month after the first explosion in Houston, ed.) and closed shortly thereafter. As a result, we have decided to move forward with the removal of all Avestor batteries as quickly as possible."

AT&T says it has no immediate guess as to how quickly it can replace all those batteries. A company spokesman does note, however, that AT&T stopped deploying Avestor batteries during the first quarter of 2007. The company announced a new battery supplier in July 2007.

Pole Hazard PPt Presentation