Mendota phones, Internet out Tuesday evening

Mendota Police Department’s phone was difficult to reach for more than an hour after 7 p.m. Tuesday, and a La Salle County Sheriff’s Office dispatcher said Mendota had a communications interruption when a fiber optic line got cut. She said she was not certain where the cut occurred, but “Frontier 911,” which watches out over the 911 system, informed the dispatchers of the problem.

At 9:10 p.m., Frontier Communications’ customer care advocate Jeff Moore said a fiber optic line outside of Mendota got cut. He said technicians got set up in LaMoille and did a “fiber shot” to determine the location of the cut.

“The latest we have is they were able to get a backhoe out there and they have been able to locate the cut,” Moore said. “They first thought it was 3.1 miles (from Mendota).” However, they determined it was in a different location.

At 9 p.m., Moore said he did not know the exact number of exchanges that were affected by the outage, and he did not know the exact location of the cut.

“They are en route and hopefully it won’t be long now,” Mooresaid. “It sounds like they are going to get it done tonight. They have three field techs and a C.O. (central office) tech out there.”

“They did say they did not have an estimated time of restoration.”

But in the meantime, Mendota Community Hospital’s business line also had a fast busy signal, and phones and Internet still were down in Mendota. Some emergency crews were provided with portable radios, according to police scanner traffic.

Mendota Bureau Chief Tamara Abbey said she had no Internet service and no land line, and was using a Sprint cell phone to call out and later that lost some of its ability other than texting.

An Earlville police officer whose shift began at 8 p.m. said a Mendota dispatcher was surprised when he was able to get through to her on a phone. He said she informed him of the outage. It was not affecting Earlville, which uses Mendota’s dispatcher.

The Earlville officer noted most emergency crews would be basically under standard operating procedures, because they rely mainly on radio dispatches and communications, which were working fine.