Phone service to resume by 6 p.m.
By Glynis Crawford Smith
The Highlander
Reports of telephone outages began rolling in shortly before noon today, Wednesday, Sept. 21., according to Marble Falls Police Chief Mark Whitacre.
The fault lies with a fiber optic line cut between Fredericksburg and Stonewall the chief said. That was confirmed about 4:45 p.m. by Gordon Shattles, the public relations manager of Frontier Communications in the company's Dallas office.
"A construction crew in the area severed a Frontier line," he said. "Our team was out immediately to re-splice and repair the line and now we are bringing everyone back online. If phones are not up yet, they will be very soon."
Chief Whitacre said Marble Falls and Blanco County phones went down, but emergency dispatch calls were routed through Burnet County."
"Calls to 9-1-1 always go through wherever you are," noted the chief. "Phones could go down all over the region and 9-1-1 calls would be routed through a public safety point (PSP) somewhere."
During the outage, calls within Marble Falls and calls going out from the city were met with a system busy tone. Many credit card connections were interrupted and Internet services went down, leaving retailers without wholesaler information and automated order processing.
The severed lines were part of the infrastructure system Frontier Communications assumed from Verizon in this area.
“It was not one of our own crews that cut the line,” said Shattles. “It can happen anytime someone is digging without checking first. It can happen fencing or putting in a building.”
By calling the 8-1-1 phone number that serves all 50 states, three days before digging, homeowners and contractors can be connected to an organization that notifies the appropriate utility companies of the plans to dig. Professional locators are then sent to the requested digging site to mark the approximate locations of underground lines with flags, spray paint or both.
"None of our services went down, but we had calls from lots of other people," said Larson Lloyd, regional director of the Northland Cable System.
The final assessment of emergency interruptions may have to come the Capital Area Council of Governments Emergency Communications Division.
