NE - Phone outages in G.I., North Platte blamed on ice

Two incidents more than 100 miles apart were blamed for a brief telephone outage that affected a handful of Alltel customers in Grand Island and about 100 in North Platte on Monday.

Ice fell off a building in Omaha and nicked a fiber-optic cable, Alltel spokesman Dwain Hebda said. A piece of machinery then failed to make an emergency switch as designed to reroute service in Grand Island, he said.

That combination of events, Hebda said, led to the outage from about 8:15 to about 9:45 a.m.

Mike Atchity of Alltel in Grand Island did not return a phone call to The Independent on Monday.

http://www.theindependent.com/stories/010901/new_phone09.html

-- Doris (nocents@bellsouth.net), January 09, 2001