Residents of Tooele County had to face problems due to loss of cell phone and landline services on Monday. The county people had difficulty in reaching out to the police and other emergency services due to the outage. The county situation turned worse due to heavy snow. Around 8 to 12 inches of snow fell in the county which blocked the roads and disrupted most of the basic services leading to a host of weather-related crashes.
According to Tooele County emergency manager Bucky Whitehouse, the reason why the problem occurred is because a construction crew accidently struck a fiber optic line that runs between Salt Lake and Tooele valleys. Both landline and cell phone services had to suffer the consequences of the damage that started in the afternoon and continued till late evening. “Most of our day has been very difficult in terms of travel. We’ve had numerous slide-offs and numerous crashes that have occurred in our main roadways in and out of the Tooele area,” he said. “So it’s been a pretty challenging day.”
Parts of Tooele Valley resumed services early evening, but the CenturyLink repair crew didn’t give an estimate as to when the complete service will be restored and the issues will be fixed. “We practice and exercise to operate without communication capability” Whitehouse said. “However, it’s unique that both cell service as well as landline service (are) down simultaneously. Fortunately, crews are aware of the situation and restoring service just as quickly as they can.”
Thankfully, anyone in Tooele can easily get emergency help by dialing 911 over their phone.
“If they have got a dial tone … our system has been forwarded to the Utah County 911 Dispatch Center and they are triaging the call and sending it back to us. And then we’re taking care of dispatching our emergency resources in the Tooele Valley,” Whitehouse said.
During the phone outages, police, fire and ambulance services were patrolling Tooele roadways and were ready to help those in trouble. “Right now, due to the heavy snowfall and the weather challenges that we’re having in the valley, we would just encourage our residents to not travel if they don’t absolutely need to go out,” he said. “Please stay home and allow our snow plows and all of our responders to be able to take care of the roads.”