Flood hangs up phone maintenance

Malia Spencer

Friday, Aug. 22, 2003 | 11:40 a.m.

Tuesday's flood caught most northwest Las Vegas residents by surprise, but perhaps no one was more startled than three Sprint workers doing routine maintenance.

The technicians were in a manhole working on lines near Alta Drive just west of Jones Boulevard Tuesday afternoon. They had access boxes open, exposing wiring and lines, according to Sprint spokeswoman Detra Page.

Robert Gaudet, a technician working on the site, said that the men noticed ominous-looking weather so they took precautions to keep the wires dry.

But he added, "We never expected this."

Then the storm hit.

The deluge soaked the wiring and about 3,000 telephone lines went out. By this morning fewer than 100 of them were still not working, and all were expected to be back in service by 10 a.m., Page said.

In his 18 years working in Las Vegas, Gaudet said, he has never had to abandon his work to escape floodwaters.

For safety reasons Gaudet was left above ground while the other two workers were down the 12-foot-deep manhole. He said once it started raining he was watching about a half inch of water running next to the curb.

"One minute it's a half inch," he said. "I turn around and I am in 2 feet of water.

"I started yelling, 'Get out of the hole! Get out of the hole,' " he said.

Because the hole was so narrow, the men had removed the ladder earlier. Gaudet said it was difficult to find it later under the rushing water.

"It scared me to death," he said.

But they found the ladder before it floated down the street with the rest of the equipment, and the men escaped unharmed, he said.

The lines, however, remained bared and were soaked by a torrent of water, Page said.

"We have been working on it since the flood," she said.

Gaudet added that the lines have current running through them at all times, so when the water came in they "fried."

A repair supervisor told Page in his 20 years in Las Vegas this type of incident has only occurred twice before.

"So it is very rare," Page said.

Cipriano Duran, who lives near Alta Drive and Rainbow Boulevard, said he lost phone service about 5:30 Tuesday evening. As a real estate photographer, his home phone also acts as his business phone, so he was unable to receive any work-related calls.

He had service back this morning, but was unsure how much his business was impacted by the outage. It was frustrating, he said.

He used a friend's cell phone to let loved ones know he was OK. But he added he has no intentions of purchasing his own cell phone after this experience.

He used the same friend's phone to make numerous calls to Sprint's repair line to find out what was going on and when his phone would be back in service.

Duran said he was upset with Sprint because he was not notified about what was being done.

"They should have left notes on the outage on doorsteps," he said. "I thought they should have done something like that."

Metro Police spokesman Officer Jose Montoya said the department received numerous calls during the outage from the northwest area probably via cell phone.

Dispatch reported that it did not have receive complaints about people not being able to reach Metro, he said.

The phone outage probably won't affect official damage estimates for Las Vegas, city spokeswoman Elaine Sanchez said.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency considers damage to public infrastructure and public facilities when determining damage estimates, she said, and the phone lines are run by a private company.

She said the final damage assessment will be done today by the state but preliminary estimates have been between $1.2 million and $1.5 million.