At least one family on Kawaihau Road in Kapa’a has been without telephone service since Saturday, victims of the latest rash of wet and windy weather. And in a turn of events which may seem ironic but is not uncommon,
At least one family on Kawaihau Road in Kapa’a has been without telephone service since Saturday, victims of the latest rash of wet and windy weather.
And in a turn of events which may seem ironic but is not uncommon, the telephone line supplying Internet access for the family’s computer is working fine.
There are streets where only one or two customers are without service, and other customers are reporting static on the lines, said Ann Nishida, Verizon Hawai’i spokeswoman.
It is the hit-and-miss nature of the outages, and the fact that they are spread out geographically here and around the state, that is slowing repairs by phone crews, she said.
Nishida said 90 percent of the Kaua’i trouble calls were water-related, meaning water from wind-driven rains had somehow gotten into phone lines or circuitry. As of Monday afternoon, though, all but nine of the 34 Kaua’i residents who reported lack of service had telephone use.
Most of those originally impacted were in the Kapa’a area. Nishida couldn’t say when the last nine would have their service restored. Most had also been without service since the weekend.
Generally, Verizon tries to get to outages within one day, “but because of the high volume in this instance we weren’t always able to quote a day” for restoration of service, Nishida said.
Calls are handled in the order they are received, so restoration of service depends on when trouble calls were received, said added.
Verizon trouble crews were working 12 and 14-hour shifts to restore service, she said. That meant overtime for crews at a time when the company was trying to avoid overtime if it could.
The storm that hit Kaua’i early last week moved east to O’ahu and the other islands, resulting in around 7,000 trouble calls a day statewide for Verizon, which normally gets about 400 such calls a day.
While water caused most of the problems on Kaua’i, myriad culprits could be responsible for telephone service outages. They include water in lines, debris clogging up circuitry, and tree branches or other objects hitting telephone lines, Nishida explained.
Staff Writer Paul C. Curtis can be reached at mailto:pcurtis@pulitzer.net or 245-3681 (ext. 224).
