Northern California fires and telecomm outages

[sethm at rollernet.us (Seth Mattinen)]

Out of curiosity, why weren't there any existing emergency/last-resort 
microwave links already in place? It seems to be known that this cable 
is a single point of failure ahead of time. Were there previous plans to 
set up any microwave links that got put on the back burner or canceled?

Is there too much focus on fiber being the only option? IMO it's harder 
for a fire to destroy a microwave path vs. a fiber path, and some 
capacity is better than no capacity.

~Seth