[Fair use for education and research purpose only]

Title: Remaining Phone Outages Should Be Restored Today

Saturday, April 8, 2000

By WILL STEWART NEWS STAFF REPORTER

Ameritech crews Friday repaired one of two telephone cables accidentally cut by construction workers earlier in the week, restoring phone service to many northeast Ann Arbor residents.

The remaining customers should have service restored by the end of the day today, once the second cable is repaired, according to Ameritech spokeswoman Julie Balmer.

"We'll have crews out there until it's fixed," Balmer said. "Obviously, we want to take care of this as soon as we can."

The severed cables cut off service to as many as 1,000 customers on Wednesday afternoon.

Balmer said the outages occurred at about 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, when a construction crew not associated with Ameritech was digging holes and bored into the two cables.

The ruptured "pulp" cables, located in the 4000 block of Geddes Road, were dug up by Ameritech crews Thursday and workers began patching them together in order to restore service, said Ameritech spokeswoman Julie Balmer.

Balmer said phone service likely will be restored on a piecemeal basis, but said she expected most of the work to be completed today.

"These are cables that, when they are cut, require a lot of labor to put back together," she said. "It's like when you drop a box of spaghetti and try to put it all back into the box."

The utility line damage marked the latest in a series of utilities problems caused by crews digging in wrong places in recent weeks in Ann Arbor.

Last week, Ann Arbor city officials placed a cease-and-desist order on a Bay City company, after its crews ruptured two natural gas lines outside of the Guy Larcom Municipal Building within a week. Those workers were laying fiber-optic cables for a company moving into the City Center building.

http://aa.mlive.com/news/index.ssf?/news/stories/20000407aphoneout.frm

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-- (Dee360Degree@aol.com), April 08, 2000