Thousands of Columbia Gorge residents picked up their phones on Monday only to hear a dead line.
A CenturyLink equipment failure knocked out landline connections and other phone systems for government agencies, businesses, and residents in four counties: Hood River, Wasco, Klickitat, and Skamania — where about 80,000 people live.
Phone service winked out early Sunday morning, and widespread outages persisted until Monday evening, when crews with the telecommunications company told authorities they had repaired the culprit hardware.
Hood River County Sheriff Matt English said the problem arose from CenturyLink’s switching equipment in The Dalles.
At about 3 a.m. Sunday, connections went awry. All Hood River County staff lost their phone lines at one point, but the most serious issue posed by the outages was the loss of the 9-1-1 emergency dispatch line.
“9-1-1 is a whole different ballgame. That’s a huge issue to not be able to take emergency calls,” English said.
Law enforcement and emergency services took action in response, English explained. A temporary 9-1-1 line was set up, but that failed at one point. The county’s five fire departments were manned through the day to help people with immediate needs.
Hood River Police Department’s non-emergency number tried to ease the situation, but even that line stopped working.
Local schools and hospitals lost their phones, with periodic fixes, until the systems came completely online.
“The phones at Providence hospital, clinics and senior village are … not working. We experienced intermittent outages over the weekend and more today. We know the carrier is working hard to get the lines fixed,” staff at Providence Hood River Memorial Hospital said in a Facebook post.
Customers with GorgeNet and other carriers were affected. Calls couldn’t connect with Gorge residents, and voice and data services failed.
All phone services in Hood River County were completely back in action by 4:53 p.m.
“We will be getting a full explanation of the issue from Centurylink and will post it on our website as soon as that information is available,” GorgeNet President Dan Bubb told customers in an email Monday evening.
Details weren’t immediately available about the technical malfunction that caused the phone scramble. North Central Public Health Department in Wasco County referred to the failure of CenturyLink’s “fiber terminal” in a news release.
A CenturyLink spokesperson was contacted for more information about the outages, but she did not respond by press time.
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