AUBURN – A service outage that quieted dozens of phones along Washington Street meant major headaches for businesses that scrambled to find other ways to reach out and touch someone.
Scores of customers have been without service since about 7 p.m. Thursday. Crews from Verizon suspect a wet cable is to blame and don’t expect to restore service until sometime today.
“We’re doing all we can to contact our customers and make other arrangements,” said Sue Bornstein, manager of Executive Communications, an answering service that handles calls for about 150 clients.
Among her clients are crisis workers, doctors, tow operators and others who need to be available around the clock. Bornstein and her staff were feverishly calling clients on cell phones Friday to make other arrangements so their clients’ calls will be handled until the regular service is restored.
“I just can’t believe this,” she said of the downed service. “This is totally unacceptable.”
Clyde Poulin, manager of New England Truck Tire, agreed. His company repairs and replaces tires for big rigs. He estimates they missed two or three roadside service jobs Thursday night because they never got the calls. At $85 per hour, that’s a good chunk of missing change.
“If we’re losing calls, we’re losing money,” he said.
Plus the tire company powers its office computers through the phone lines. Poulin said he’d planned to bill out about $7,000 in invoices Friday, but had to shift the work to the main office in Scarborough.
“They weren’t too happy,” he said.
Bornstein said she notified her carrier, Choice One of Rochester, N.Y., of the problem around 7 p.m. Thursday when Executive Communications staff noticed a humming on their lines. Then there was nothing; the lines were dead.
Bornstein said despite repeated calls to Choice One, no one called her back until early Friday morning. A technician from Verizon – the company that maintains the phone lines – showed up around 8:30 a.m.
Crews were working all along Main Street Friday, opening manhole covers trying to pinpoint the problem. A submerged cable under the Longley Bridge was the apparent source of the problem. According to Phil Lindley, spokesman for the Public Utilities Commission which was notified of the outage, Verizon crews were pumping water out of the trouble spot to repair the cable.
Lindley said Verizon logged 100 trouble reports by 1 p.m. Friday for that section of Auburn. No one from the phone company could say precisely how many people were affected by the outage, but complaints came in from along lower Washington Street, and scattered pockets on Main Street.
For the affected businesses, many were finding ways to make do.
Steve Ness of Ness Oil decided to take out a newspaper ad to give his clients alternative numbers they can call until his office phone service is restored. Poulin said Oxford Networks, his local carrier, programmed his office line to a portable Nextel phone, so he won’t miss other calls.
Bornstein was having some of her clients’ lines programmed into cell phones; others were going to be forwarded to a phone bank at nearby Crystal Springs, which her husband owns and which has phone service.
One of her clients, Ace Professional Towing, is grateful for the arrangement. When manager Dave Reynolds realized his tow company didn’t have phone coverage Thursday night, he went into the office and staffed the phones all night long.
“We got about 20 or so calls,” said a bleary-eyed Reynolds. “It wasn’t that busy.”
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