Las Vegas Sun

November 24, 2009

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Digging crew interrupts cable service

Wednesday, Oct. 7, 1998 | 11:37 a.m.

Transmission to about 1,500 cable television customers was interrupted for three hours Tuesday morning when construction workers broke a fiber optic cable during excavation.

The outage was in the area of West Charleston and Rampart boulevards, according to Cox Communications director Steve Schorr.

Schorr said the construction company, Wells Cargo, failed to find out where cables in the area were located before digging.

"My company alone has 4,300 miles of cable and fiber underground in Southern Nevada," Schorr noted. "It's critical for people to get line locations and then to observe them. It doesn't cost anything."

He said the problem of breaking underground lines is too common in spite of a state law that requires companies call a hotline two days in advance of excavation.

"We have one of the stronger call-before-you-dig programs in the country and people just don't utilize it correctly," Schorr said.

Schorr noted that Cox, which recently bought out Prime Cable, has very aggressive customer service standards.

"If an outage lasts four hours we will automatically credit all of the customers in the affected areas, even if they were not watching TV during the period," Schorr said.

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