Phone service goes out for six hours

Telephone service throughout Flathead and Lake counties was interrupted for about six hours Wednesday after a CenturyLink fiber-optic line near the naval base at Bremerton, Wash., was cut.

Phone service in Kalispell went out between 9 and 10 a.m. and was restored at 3:20 p.m. Service in the two counties was restored in an area-by-area process, but by 4 p.m. CenturyLink Marketing Development Manager John Bemis said all areas in the two Northwest Montana counties were back on line.

Late Wednesday afternoon Bemis said company officials still hadn’t been able to learn how the line had been cut.

“As we review and evaluate the situation, we expect to learn that,” he said.

People in Washington, Idaho and the two Montana counties were affected by the outage. Both land lines and cellphones were affected, Bemis said. Internet service was not affected, nor was there any interruption to the local 911 system or other emergency telephone services, he said.

Most customers were still able to make local calls, he said, but long-distance service was down for the six or so hours.

CenturyLink workers installed 1,000 feet of new cable to replace the damaged line, Bemis said.

The Kalispell office was notified of the outage via CenturyLink’s network operations center that tracks line damage and outages in real time.

Bemis said if any customers are still without phone service, they should call CenturyLink’s help desk at 1-800-824-2877, because any outages now are likely the result of some other problem.

Reporter Shelley Ridenour may be reached at 758-4439 or sridenour@dailyinterlake.com.