TheCableVine
June 14th, 2008, 02:05 AM
RedOrbit.com (http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1429427/911_service_back_in_colusa/)
Jun. 12--TELEPHONE AND INTERNET SERVICES -- and more importantly the emergency 911 system -- are running again in Colusa County after a construction mishap knocked out phone links for much of Tuesday.
A backhoe sliced a buried fiber-optic cable at Sixth and B streets in Williams, according to City Manager Jim Manning. The accident cut off almost all long-distance phone access to the county, along with emergency calling and Internet access, for more than seven hours.
Callers were forced to dial police and fire agencies directly, including the Sheriff's Department, after the 911 network failed. It was restored at 11:45 p.m., officials reported.
Some cellular calls continued to go through during the outage, allbeit often with reduced signal strength.
Calls into and out of the county started connecting around 6:45 p.m., following repairs to the cable by a Frontier crew. Pooling water slowed the work as repair workers had to purge the water out of manholes, said Frontier spokeswoman Stephanie Beasly. All phone service was restored by midnight Wednesday.
The contractor at the site, Hill and Hill of Yuba City, was cutting trenches to install an 8-inch underground sewer line. Manning said that records distributed by Underground Service Alert -- a clearinghouse for information on buried utility lines in California -- should have revealed the phone cable's presence downtown.
"A lot of times (the information) is not right on the money, it might be a foot or so off, but they don't usually miss lines completely," he said Wednesday.
About 1,000 subscribers to the ColusaNET wireless online service lost their connections, according to CEO Rick Kunze. The Colusa firm relies on Frontier data lines to help deliver its Internet service.
Jun. 12--TELEPHONE AND INTERNET SERVICES -- and more importantly the emergency 911 system -- are running again in Colusa County after a construction mishap knocked out phone links for much of Tuesday.
A backhoe sliced a buried fiber-optic cable at Sixth and B streets in Williams, according to City Manager Jim Manning. The accident cut off almost all long-distance phone access to the county, along with emergency calling and Internet access, for more than seven hours.
Callers were forced to dial police and fire agencies directly, including the Sheriff's Department, after the 911 network failed. It was restored at 11:45 p.m., officials reported.
Some cellular calls continued to go through during the outage, allbeit often with reduced signal strength.
Calls into and out of the county started connecting around 6:45 p.m., following repairs to the cable by a Frontier crew. Pooling water slowed the work as repair workers had to purge the water out of manholes, said Frontier spokeswoman Stephanie Beasly. All phone service was restored by midnight Wednesday.
The contractor at the site, Hill and Hill of Yuba City, was cutting trenches to install an 8-inch underground sewer line. Manning said that records distributed by Underground Service Alert -- a clearinghouse for information on buried utility lines in California -- should have revealed the phone cable's presence downtown.
"A lot of times (the information) is not right on the money, it might be a foot or so off, but they don't usually miss lines completely," he said Wednesday.
About 1,000 subscribers to the ColusaNET wireless online service lost their connections, according to CEO Rick Kunze. The Colusa firm relies on Frontier data lines to help deliver its Internet service.