Verizon Phone Service Cut After Cable Is Severed

A severed fiber optic cable knocked out service to tens of thousands of Verizon telephone customers in Ventura County on Tuesday, including hospitals, fire departments and police 911 service.

The outage hit at 2 p.m. and lasted about five hours, prompting dozens of police officers, sheriff’s deputies and firefighters to patrol the streets for emergency situations. None were immediately reported.

“If somebody had a heart attack in this period and couldn’t call 911, they were really out of luck,” said Kris Carraway-Bowman, a spokeswoman for Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks.

Los Robles, one of the county’s largest hospitals, had its employees use ham radios to communicate with emergency workers in the field and asked several doctors and nurses to work longer shifts.

The affected areas included most of Thousand Oaks, Camarillo, Oxnard, Newbury Park, Santa Paula, Ojai and parts of Ventura, said Julia Wilson, a Verizon spokeswoman. Minor outages were also reported in Malibu and Santa Barbara.

Carraway-Bowman said the hospital was placed on “code orange,” the facility’s highest disaster alert. She said the outage was the second such incident in the last three months.

Sheriff’s Capt. Ken Cozzens said deputies responded to more than 40 locations in the county from where 911 calls were placed about the time the phone service was cut.

In those cases, Cozzens said, the sheriff’s dispatch center in Ventura received the emergency calls and saw the addresses of the callers on their computers, but dispatchers could not hear their voices.

The sheriff’s communication center averages 300 calls a day.

Santa Paula Police Chief Bob Gonzales said his department was helpless to deal with emergencies. “We don’t know how many people are calling for help and can’t get through,” he said.

Officer Robert Stuva at the California Highway Patrol office in Ventura said the communications center there was inundated with calls from cellular telephones--many from people who reached for mobile phones when their home or office service died to report both the outage and other problems.

Several county fire dispatchers went to the CHP office to help the dispatchers there field emergency calls and notify the proper agencies, Stuva said.

The outage occurred when a construction crew severed an above-ground cable off of Saddle Peak Road near Malibu in Los Angeles County, Wilson said.