Verizon: Phones back, Internet coming

Published 10:04 am Saturday, January 2, 2010

WINDSOR—Landline telephone service has been restored to all customers affected by the Dec. 22 fire at a Verizon switching station on Church Street in Windsor, according to a company spokesman.

Verizon spokesman Harry Mitchell said service was restored Wednesday to the last of the landline customers. In all, about 1,600 lines in the Windsor area were without service for days.

Mitchell said Verizon doesn’t release the number of high-speed Internet customers it has for competitive reasons, but about half of those affected had their service restored as of Thursday morning.

The switching station fire was started after a Dominion Virginia Power cable fell on to a copper communications cable near the switching station, according to Verizon officials. The fire initially interrupted telephone service in a large area from Wakefield to Suffolk, but the bulk of the customers outside of southern Isle of Wight had their service restored before Christmas Eve.

Mitchell said the company’s response to the fire “has been strong,” considering the magnitude of the damage and the rarity of the event that caused the damage.

“That said, we’ll thoroughly review the entire incident with an eye toward learning from it,” Mitchell wrote in an e-mail Thursday.

Contacted by phone Thursday morning, Windsor Mayor Marvin Crocker Jr. had nothing but praises for the Verizon workers—who worked through the Christmas holiday and cold, damp conditions to get service restored.

“We need to take our hats off to them, as well as the county officials,” Crocker said.

The service outages left area businesses scrambling to operate without telephone and Internet communications for days.

Greg Willis, of the Isle of Wight County Farm Bureau in Windsor, said it “was a struggle” to keep the business running without telephone and Internet service.

“We’re very happy that they got it up as quickly as they did,” he said. The Farm Bureau operated at a “limited capacity” until telephone and Internet services were restored Monday morning and late Monday evening, respectively.

Bridgette Dorsett, owner of Taste Cravers in Windsor, estimates that her restaurant lost about $400 to $500 in sales because of the telephone and Internet outage.

“Most of our lunch during the week is call-ins,” she said. In addition to not being able to take call-in orders, credit cards couldn’t be processed without telephone or Internet service.

Dorsett said telephone service was restored the day after Christmas and Internet was restored Thursday morning.

“Everything’s back to usual,” she said Thursday afternoon. “I’m just glad they worked as diligently as they did.”

Even Paul D. Camp Community College in Franklin was affected by the service outage.

Beverly Davenport, the college’s information technology manager, said the college was without Internet and telephone service until Wednesday afternoon, except for a 12-hour period on Christmas Eve.

While businesses were adversely affected by the lack of telephone and Internet service, Crocker said that Isle of Wight County and Verizon officials did a good job keeping everyone informed of the situation.

“I feel pretty confident that everything that could be done has been done to assist businesses in town,” he said.