Phone service, including 911 calls, was recovered by late Monday afternoon after an outage caused by a downed CenturyLink switch in The Dalles was repaired.
Wasco County Sheriff Lane Magill said technicians with CenturyLink told dispatch staff Monday mid-afternoon that 911 calls were coming through.
After the outage first occurred early Sunday, the sheriff’s office established an alternate emergency number of 541-993-8911. It sent out a citizen’s alert about the temporary 911 number to people who have signed up for emergency notifications. However, people who only got notifications via landline would not have gotten the notice because landlines were down, while cell phone service seemed less interrupted.
The Hood River County Sheriff’s Office was also without phone service and listed an alternate emergency number of 805-399-2711.
In The Dalles, the phone outage led to at least one bank being closed for a time Monday morning. At least one drive-through restaurant had a sign saying they could only accept cash, which dampened sales.
By afternoon, calls were going through to Mid-Columbia Medical Center and its clinics, but service was intermittent. Earlier, the hospital posted a notice on its webpage telling people who had medical emergencies, but could not reach the hospital or clinics or 911, to go directly to the emergency room.
The hospital encouraged people trying to reach a patient at the hospital to “try calling them on their personal cell phone. You are also welcome to come visit them at our hospital.”
Local schools were also largely without external phone service Monday morning, but it was restored by afternoon.
The problems were first reported Sunday morning at 3 a.m., according to a post on the Gorge Networks webpage. GorgeNet is a customer of CenturyLink, and submitted a trouble ticket like other customers did.
“Since 3 a.m. Sunday,” GorgeNet posted on its website, “the telephone poles and some cellular towers in the gorge have not been functional. CenturyLink owns the poles in this area and are currently working to repair.”
The widespread outage affected not just CenturyLink, but other phone customers as well.
In an email late Monday morning to the Chronicle, GorgeNet said CenturyLink’s “main voice switch, located in The Dalles, is down, and it has not provided an estimate of when repairs would be done.”
The email noted, “We have a trouble ticket in with CenturyLink as I’m sure many do. We have not been given an ETA, nor have we been given a realistic explanation of the problem. We know a little more than most since we hand voice traffic to each other and that handoff is down.
“We know it has to do with their voice switch and the links that connect them to the rest of the world.”
Later Monday, the GorgeNet official sent another email reply the Chronicle to say they had just spoken with a CenturyLink employee familiar with the issue and “they mentioned the outage was with a significant piece of equipment and that they were in the process of replacing it. It is apparently a significant amount of effort.”
The GorgeNet official continued, “We switched our 911 service to bypass the outage so at least our customers can call 911. I don’t know when 911 will be restored for CenturyLink customers.”
A spokeswoman for CenturyLink responded to inquiries from the Chronicle by saying in a Monday email, “All services previously impacted have now been restored.”
She did not respond to questions about the nature and scope of the outage.
Phone service at The Dalles Chronicle was down Monday, and most information for this article was gathered by email.
Klickitat County rerouted its 911 calls to Clark County. Internet services for customers in Goldendale were affected also.
GorgeNet said any updates to its service would be posted at http://www.gorge.net/support/system-status-2-2/.
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