FAYETTE COUNTY, Texas — Leaders in Fayette County say fiber lines have been cut multiple times, impacting some peoples' phone service for hours at a time.
Chief Deputy Randy Noviskie of the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office said the office get thousands of 911 calls each month that they haven’t been able to directly take on several occasions.
“June 12, June 21, June 26 – we've had fiber cuts,” Noviskie said.
Noviskie said the office's landlines just went dead, with the most recent outage this past Wednesday.
“It went from anywhere from 11 hours being knocked out, to as low as about four hours,” Noviskie said.
Noviskie said the sheriff's office thankfully has contingency plans in place for situations like these. He said through using the Capital Area Council of Governments regional directory, calls are immediately directed to Lee County.
“They answer 911 calls and relay it back to us by cellphone, and that's how we communicate and then we dispatch it out,” he said. “There’s not really no time lost.”
Noviskie said while it doesn't affect response times, the office is having to alert the public on social media every time an outage happens. He said he isn't sure what’s causing the cuts.
KVUE reached out to Frontier Communications, the provider for the sheriff's office. The company provided a statement, claiming that cuts are tied to a road widening project on U.S. 77 and that they work daily to avoid problems and quickly restore service.
“That's not a problem for us, but businesses are knocked out and it affects them tremendously,” Noviskie said.
Nicole Krenek and Katie Hamborsky are waitresses at Orsak's Cafe in Fayetteville and said the restaurant gets thousands of calls for online orders.
“I'd say probably 60 to 65% of our business is to-go orders,” Hamborsky said.
They said their fiber connections, provided by CVCTX, have also been cut multiple times – sometimes for days at a time.
“We have customers, and they come in and they get upset at us because they can't get through. And they think we're just not answering the phone, which is not the case,” Krenek said.
Orsak's is one of two restaurants in town, so losing potential business hurts. The waitresses say if people can’t get through to them on the phone, customers just assume they’re closed.
“It’s stressful, and it's frustrating,” Hamborsky said. “We feed a lot of people around here.”
They hope the cuts stop, so they have service people can rely on.
“To me, it’s a display of incompetence to have it happen so frequently," Hamborsky said. "They should know – I mean, are there not machines that use sensors to know where the lines are?"
KVUE reached out to Fayette County to ask if officials are aware of the fiber outages due to construction along the highway, but we did not hear back by the time of publication.