Severed fiber optic cable cause Saturday outage

Verizon released a statement to news sources on Saturday noting: “Earlier today, our primary fiber vendor experienced two separate fiber cuts to their primary and backup network that disrupted service to some of our cell sites.”

MetroNet posted a similar message attributing the outage to a severed optical cable. The outage began Saturday morning and service was restored after 9 p.m. that evening.

“Everything should be up now. We’re sorry for the interruption. We understand that this was bad time, especially on the weekend. We appreciate your patience as we worked through the situation.”

Susie Lawrence, Jefferson County 911 Executive Director, said the communication disruption impacted the county’s Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) in which detailed information is cataloged for all calls.

“We went to the old form of paper,” she said, and then entered them all once the system was back up, which she said was around 10 p.m. on Saturday.

Lawrence said local 911 calls were not impacted because they are managed by another system. However, all other regular calls were affected and dispatchers used personal cell phones to communicate with other counties despite having sporadic issues with Verizon cell service on Saturday.

Lawrence praised the dispatchers who worked Saturday for making the best out of a difficult situation.

“They did a fine job” and were able to respond to every call, she said.

“No one was left out in the cold,” she added, noting they still were able to connect with officers through regular two-way radio communication.