Some 44,000 Qwest telephone customers in northeastern Ore. lost l...
Some 44,000 Qwest telephone customers in northeastern Ore. lost long distance access for 15 hours Mon. when gophers gnawed through an armored fiber cable near Pendleton, Ore. The damage affected customers in Baker, Umatilla, Union and Wallowa Counties. Service…
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went out shortly after midnight and was restored around 3 p.m. Customers could make local and 911 calls, but couldn’t make toll calls because the gophers had taken out the primary cable linking the area to points beyond, and automatic rerouting to alternate lines failed to work. The cable loss also affected some Verizon customers in the region whose toll traffic normally transited Qwest’s network. Qwest said the cable’s armor was supposed to resist rodents; it’s investigating the failure, along with the failure of automatic rerouting.