Residents of Austin, Texas are saying a Google Fiber (NASDAQ: GOOG) installation is to blame for flood damage to their homes that occurred during record rainfall in October 2015.
As many as a dozen homes were flooded and those residents claim it's because MasTec, a company Google contracts for fiber installations, left debris behind after construction that blocked storm drains.
Google Fiber said it is currently looking into the situation.
"Our sympathies are with the families affected by the historic Halloween floods. We're still working closely with our contractors to understand the details of the situation. Whenever we learn of issues, we do everything we can to identify and resolve them appropriately," a Google Fiber spokesperson told FierceInstaller.
The flooding in question took place amid some extremely high volumes of rainfall. Austin Bergstrom International Airport (ABIA) reported nearly 15 inches of rain in one day during the flooding.
Google is still in the process of building out 3,000 miles of fiber within the Austin metro area. Google announced its plans to offer Google Fiber service in Austin back in 2013. At that time, the Google's plan was to begin connecting home by mid-2014, but the company said it's taken longer than that because it's had to design the fiber network from scratch. In the meantime, AT&T (NYSE: T) has propped up its own 1 Gbps service in Austin, Texas.
The recent complaints in Austin, Texas are not the first time Google Fiber construction has rubbed residents the wrong way. In December, residents in Raleigh and Cary, N.C. said that Google construction crews had cut off their water supply, cut up their lawns, or blocked roads during the installation process.
For more:
- see this KVUE report
- see this KXAN report
- see this Google post
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