Local News in Brief : 26,000 Santa Clarita Phones Out 6 Hours
About 26,000 customers in the Newhall and Valencia areas were without telephone service for six hours Saturday because of a breakdown in the phone company’s computerized switching equipment, a Pacific Bell spokeswoman said.
The failure, which occurred roughly between 2 and 8 p.m., was caused by malfunctioning computer software, spokeswoman Lissa Zanville said. Numbers in the 805 area code with the prefixes 254, 255, 259, 286 and 296 were affected, she said, including that of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in Valencia, which is the primary law enforcement agency in the area.
The emergency “911” number was not affected directly but people were overloading it with non-emergency calls, Zanville said.
Fortunately, Sheriff’s Sgt. Charles Lane said, “We had no major incident at all.”
Deputies enlisted the help of a local radio station to ask people to call another sheriff’s station, in Lancaster, for non-emergency police service, Lane said. The Lancaster station then relayed the calls on a separate telephone hot line.
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