By Alex Paul
Telephone customers from Philomath to Sweet Home experienced service problems Thursday after a contractor doing underground work in the Tangent area cut through a Qwest fiber optic cable.
The accident occurred about 11:30 a.m., and starting about 9 p.m. service was restored.
Telephone service as far away as Canby and Mount Angel was affected.
Locally, CenturyTel customers in Lebanon, Sweet Home, Shedd and Brownsville, and Pioneer Telephone Cooperative customers in Benton County were affected. Residential and business customer services were restored throughout the night and were completed by early today.
Don Neely, a spokesman for CenturyTel, said pinpointing the total number of customers affected would be difficult because service varied from intermittent to none. Neely said CenturyTel customers could call within their own network, but long distance was a problem. The same was true for Pioneer customers.
"Let's say you need 10 lanes of traffic on a normal day and five are taken out when the cable is cut, the remaining five lanes have to carry a lot more load," Neely said. "Sometimes, the five lanes are open and sometimes they are clogged."
The Linn County 911 emergency dispatch system remained operational, but some Pioneer Telephone customers could not call the Benton County 911 dispatch center for several hours.
DSL Internet service was also degraded, much like long distance and even cellular phone traffic, Neely said.
"Some of the long distance circuits were out," Neely said. "Sometimes customers could get a circuit to call out and sometimes they couldn't. Although cellular calls go through towers, they have to enter the landline system at some point if you are calling a desk phone. So, some cellular calls were affected as well."
Businesses had problems using credit card machines to verify accounts. If the verification number was local, transactions went through. If they were based at a long distance call center, they probably didn't.