Communications in Mass. Affected by Mattress Fire

Aug. 30, 2012
A small mattress fire under a Lawrence bridge knocked out Verizon phone, cable and Internet service, thousands of homeowners and businesses as well as emergency services.

NEWBURYPORT — Almost two days after a small mattress fire under a Lawrence bridge knocked out Verizon phone, cable and Internet service, thousands of homeowners and businesses, including many in Greater Newburyport, remained affected last night.

Among those dealing with service disruptions were police departments in Newburyport, Salisbury, Amesbury and Merrimac.

Police officials in those communities said the fire, which took place in a homeless hang-out, has left them with spotty — at best — access to state computer databases

Phone service, including emergency 911 calls, however, was not affected, officials said.

Dispatchers in Newburyport and Salisbury reported receiving sporadic calls from frustrated residents wondering when service might return. As of last night, Verizon service in at least part of Amesbury remained down.

Verizon said technicians have been working around the clock, splicing hair’s-width copper and fiber optic wires back together, to repair the damage done early Monday morning by the fire in a homeless man’s mattress. The makeshift bed had been placed atop two dozen PVC pipes carrying thousands of wires underneath Lawrence’s Central Bridge and over the Merrimack River.

The fire took out communication services to thousands, including businesses, municipal offices, public safety dispatch centers and homes.

Verizon spokesman Phil Santoro said service was expected to be restored to a “significant number of customers” last night with more to be restored today, but still did not provide information about how many customers were affected.

The company still would only confirm there were service disruptions in a handful of communities, including Andover, North Andover, Lawrence, Methuen, North Reading, Tewksbury and Littleton, and customers in other communities “may have been affected.” However, customers throughout Greater Newburyport and from Dracut to Gloucester and from Haverhill to Marlboro have reported outages to The Daily News’ sister paper, The Eagle-Tribune. Numerous people reported they were told service would be restored and it wasn’t, while others had service restored, only to go out again. Santoro said another update would be provided today by noon.

“I have no Internet and long-distance calls cannot be made,” Marjorie Proulx of Haverhill said in an e-mail to The Eagle-Tribune yesterday around midday. “Incoming calls are not an issue. I called Verizon before 9 a.m., was told to try back in 24 hours. I need the connection for work. The representative said she will phone me when it is up.”

Lawrence police Chief Jack Bergeron said communication with Verizon may have been part of the problem for them, too, when the fire broke out. When firefighters showed up at the scene shortly after midnight, they saw signs reading, “High voltage wires.” He said fire crews on scene waited to put water on the cables until they could determine whether there was any electricity running through the wires, which there wasn’t.

“Standing operating procedure is that you don’t put water on high-voltage lines until you can determine what was going on with the lines,” he said. Initially, he said, “No water was put on the fire.”

He said he has a list of emergency contacts for every utility in the area, except Verizon.

“We don’t have such a number with Verizon,” he said. “And they can be very difficult to get hold of.”

After firefighters finally got through to someone at Verizon and found there was no electricity in the cables, they began putting out the fire.

“My guess is, in a situation like that, with something burning under the bridge, it takes a long time to be discovered and the damage was probably done well before we got on scene,” he said.

Once the damage was done, however, it takes a long time to fix, according to Verizon officials.

Allison Cole, Verizon president of operations in New England, said in a statement yesterday morning that crews were working around the clock under the bridge.

“Verizon crews worked through the night and made very good progress on restoring service for our customers,” Cole said. “We have already restored critical network operational and surveillance circuits, high-capacity fiber backbone circuits and worked with state and local officials to ensure that all 911 services are fully operational in the area.”

Ed Starr, business manager for International Brotherhood of Electrical 2321, said there have been five or six crews working nonstop to restore service. Each crew has four or five workers.

“It has been all hands on deck,” Starr said. “Anybody that is qualified has been asked to work. There are more than enough workers.”

He said there are thousands of pieces of fiber running through the bridge and each of those fibers has to be identified to each individual customer. The color codes for each fiber have been burned off in the fire making the work even more difficult.

“You are left there with basically pieces of spaghetti (that need to be identified and reattached),” he said.

Starr said he is impressed with the progress the workers have made so far, given the complexity of the repairs.

“I am surprised this morning about how much they got done,” Starr said yesterday.

However, he said the workers still don’t know how long it will take for the damage to be completely repaired.

It is unclear whether the incident will trigger an investigation by the statte attorney general’s office, which is armed with a new law allowing the state to go after utilities that fail to respond to their customers during a crisis. The law was spawned by last year’s storms during which National Grid and other utility companies took weeks to fix power lines and restore service to residents throughout the state, including many in the Merrimack Valley.

Sue Terez, of Marblehead Street in North Andover, said she called the company four times and got different stories every time.

“None of the customer support technicians were aware of the fire,” she said. “The last time I called (8:30 p.m. Monday), they said they had no idea when it (service) would be back.”

Tim O’Leary, who lives at the Royal Crest Estates in North Andover, said his Internet and TV were working most of the day Monday, then shut down during the Red Sox game Monday night. He was still without service yesterday.

“The most concerning thing for me is my cell phone not working,” he said in an e-mail. “And I have Sprint for cell service.”

Eventually, when he left North Andover and went to a family member’s house in another town, he got service back.

Staff writer Dave Rogers contributed to this report.

Copyright 2012 The Daily News of NewburyportDistributed by Newsbank, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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