Phone outage cripples Mid-Valley businesses

WESLACO -- Francisco Valle spent much of Tuesday preparing pizzas for customers who couldn't call to place an order.

Those hungry enough to show up in person to the Domino's Pizza franchise on Weslaco's South Texas Boulevard had to pay in cash. The credit card machines were offline.

Across the street, the Inter National Bank closed its doors early after its Internet service and ATMs went down. And employees at Ruben Cardenas' State Farm Insurance firm loitered around quiet phones, haranguing their boss to give them the rest of the day off.

"They just want to go home," Cardenas said. "But who knows, maybe the lines will come back up soon."

Telecommunication services across the city were interrupted Tuesday, after AT&T contractors severed a fiber optic line while trying to move it for a road construction project.

With cell phone towers, landlines and Internet service down, the work day for many Mid-Valley businesses came to an abrupt and extended halt.

"All kinds of transactions are affected in this day of technology," said Martha Noell, chief executive officer of the Weslaco Chamber of Commerce. "Everything depends on Internet and phone lines."

The service outage, which originated near the intersection of Expressway 83 and White Ranch Road in La Feria, lasted from 10 a.m. until just before 4 p.m., AT&T spokeswoman April Borlinghaus said.

Although AT&T owns the severed line, its own service was not interrupted. Only customers of Verizon, which shares AT&T's cable, experienced outages.

Verizon serves only two small slices of Hidalgo County, including Weslaco, Progreso and parts of Mercedes and Mission, but company officials were unable to estimate how many customers were affected by the outages.

As phone lines across Weslaco went dead it only took minutes for the effects to be felt.

Calls stopped reaching the city's 9-1-1 line, but police quickly re-routed the calls to neighboring departments and kept in touch via radio, said David Molina, a Weslaco police spokesman.

With ATMs down and no access to the Internet at Laredo National Bank, the bank's Vanessa Garza turned one account holder after another away, asking them to come back later.

A long lunch was out of the question for many idle office workers, as restaurants warned they were accepting "Cash Only."

At one point, a man left his wife as collateral at the popular Sunrise Restaurant along Texas Boulevard while he drove to another city to find a working ATM, the diner's employees said.

Chamber of Commerce head Noell said it would be impossible to estimate the economic impact of the outages without knowing exactly how many businesses were affected. But this isn't the first time the city has experienced problems with Verizon's service.

"The same thing happened about two years ago," she said. "It's very, very difficult to be isolated."

Weslaco's public utilities board has awarded Verizon its business over the past several years even though much of the Valley is serviced by AT&T, said George Garrett, the city's emergency management coordinator.

Although similar outages have occurred, Verizon has not granted requests from city officials to divert traffic to other providers in the case of extended service disruption. A Pittsburgh-based spokesman for the company was unfamiliar with that situation.

"We've talked about it," Garrett said. "But this is the system we have to work with."
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Jeremy Roebuck covers courts and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4437.