Fergie's Tech Blog

Crews Survey Rita's Damage to Phones

An AP newswire article, via Yahoo! News, reports that:

Telephone and cell phone outages persisted in parts of Texas and Louisiana Sunday, and telecommunication companies had crews out surveying and repairing the damage caused by Hurricane Rita.

Joe Chandler, spokesman for BellSouth Corp., said about 560,000 customers were without service, mainly in northern Louisiana and northern Mississippi. He said crews already were out in areas that weren't severely flooded.

"A lot of these lines are affected by loss of power," Chandler said. "Once power is restored, you'll see our outages go down."

San Antonio-based SBC Communications Inc. said on its Web site that its core network in Texas "is fully functional, with the exception of a small central office in Sabine Pass," near hard-hit Port Arthur.

Mark Siegel of Cingular Wireless said that "well over half of our sites are up" in Texas and Louisiana.

"We fared better than we did with Hurricane Katrina, and that's probably true for any of the carriers," Siegel said.

posted by Fergie @ 9/25/2005 02:53:00 PM