Wet Cables Clog Phone Service for 22,000 Users

Beepers wouldn’t beep, facsimile machines wouldn’t fax and telephones wouldn’t ring for nearly 22,000 General Telephone customers Thursday as water seeping onto some cables fouled up South Bay phone service for more than five hours.

Irritated Torrance and Redondo Beach customers contended with sporadic service as workers scrambled to fix the problem between 9:46 a.m., when the lines first shorted out, and 3 p.m., when the last of the wet cables had been dried out and put back on-line.

Although telephone service was restored to most of its customers by 3 p.m., some phone users were unable to complete any calls until after 5 p.m., said GTE District Manager Kevin Peterson.

Static interfered with many phone conversations as crews worked to splice around a water-logged telephone cable, he said. They were expected to be finished at 8:30 p.m., he added.

Peterson said it took company workers several hours just to trace the problem, which they initially thought might involve a severed cable.

“As it turns out, it was a failure of one of our splice cases in a manhole (in Hermosa Beach),” Peterson said, describing the device as a pressurized container that protects cable connections from the elements.

“The air pressure left this particular case, which allowed water to seep in and cause shorts and all kinds of problems,” he said.

The cluster of wet cables created partial service interruptions to 21,971 business and residential customers who have telephone numbers beginning with 316, 540, 543 and 792, he said.

Although the failure affected scattered pockets of customers, he said the general boundaries of the outage were Hawthorne Boulevard on the east, the Strand on the west, Pacific Coast Highway on the south and Del Amo Boulevard on the north.

Most customers could receive calls, he said, but could not dial outside the local service area.

A few of the thousands of affected customers, however, reported a wide range of problems.

“We started realizing there was a problem fairly early on because we have a system on the switchboard which counts calls, and the operators saw that the amount of calls coming in wasn’t normal,” said Susan Washburn, a spokeswoman for Little Company of Mary Hospital in Torrance.

“One doctor said he knew there was a problem because his beeper wasn’t going off,” she said. “He had to go back to the old-fashioned system of telling his office, ‘I’ll be at this number until this time and then I’ll be at this other number for an hour.’ It was really difficult for him.”

The problem did not interfere with any medical emergencies, however, Washburn said.

Redondo Beach attorney Stanley Dzieminski said he first noticed the problem when he tried to call his office Thursday morning to relay instructions for an important project.

“Law offices live by the telephone and the fax machine,” he said. “I was very annoyed that I couldn’t reach the office. I thought it was kind of peculiar that every single line into the office was busy . . . even my own private line.”

Many customers expressed surprise when they learned that they weren’t the only ones with balky telephones.

“We were wondering what the heck was going on,” said Taj O’Toole, a commercial service representative with South Bay Insurance. “We couldn’t hear the party calling in. They could hear us but we couldn’t hear them. . . . Other people were calling in complaining that all our circuits were busy.”

Peterson said he received no reports of severe problems caused by the equipment failure.

“Obviously, 22,000 customers is a significant number,” he said. “We’re very sorry that it did happen.”