It’s an important point about power supply continuity and possible emergency services considerations.
<rant>I am sure that I have said before that I wish the government would enforce mobile phone mast operators to have both a UPs and a diesel generator at base stations, one with at minimum 48 hours runtime, 100 hours runtime in certain designated cases. They should also be required to have certain numbers of auxiliary mobile generators which can quickly be brought on to site, by helicopter where applicable. These should be required to have hot switchover facilities so that one new generator unit can be brought online without first turning off an existing unit and with the necessary hardware in place to handle two units running together, allowing a seamless changeover with zero downtime.
Thinks back to the chaos of fourteen years ago, January 2005 with power down for days, trees uprooted by the
hurricane, tree trunks snapped, winds over 120 mph up where I am. Road in South Skye washed away into the sea, completely gone and needing to be rebuilt. The maintenance backlog must have quite daunting. Memory falters as to what the recorded wind speeds were, there was one reading at the Skye Bridge, of iirc 124mph, but that is on the sheltered side of the island and of course down at approx at sea level. In contrast, I am four hundred feet up and on the exposed side of the island looking straight out to the south west into the teeth of it. I seem to remember some figure reported from the Western Isles which was rather worse than that originating at the relatively sheltered Skye Bridge.
Many times we desperately need to rely on mobile phone networks now to just
be there, no excuses. Like a few years back, when Mrs Weaver was coming home from Inverness, parked her car in the branches of a tree in Srath Carrann and luckily had her phone and had some signal so she could call for an ambulance.</rant>