MONROE — Phone service in the Monroe area was restored late Tuesday night after a lengthy outage.
Roughly 1,000 people were affected, mostly in the downtown corridor, Monroe Assistant Fire Chief Steve Guptill said Wednesday.
The outage started just before 2:50 p.m.
A construction crew was using an excavator to dig a water line in the Chain Lake Road area and accidentally snipped a fiber optic cable, Guptill said. That knocked out a lot of land lines, including phones at City Hall, and limited access to 911.
Affected cell phone carriers included AT&T, Sprint and Verizon.
Emergency crews went on roving patrols, and encouraged people to report emergencies at police and fire stations. No major incidents were reported during the outages, Guptill said.
Service was mostly restored by about 8:30 p.m., though some spotty outages were reported for the next couple of hours.
Monroe-area emergency responders were well-prepared but still plan to debrief on how they handled the situation, Guptill said.
“It gave us a good opportunity to review some of our disaster scenarios and what happens if we do lose phone service,” he said.
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