A San Benito County communications agent said that the phone
outages in Santa Cruz and Santa Clara counties have no effect on
911 emergency services for San Benito County.
”
Everything is fine,
”
said Beth Kafer, communications manager with the San Benito
County Sheriff’s Office.
”
We had no outage and no delay in duties.
”
Much of the Internet, phone and cellular services to Hollister, Gilroy and Morgan Hill have been interrupted due to a cable having been cut earlier this morning. The outage has brought much of the cities to a standstill as many businesses are unable to process credit card orders, bank security systems are not working and residents cannot contact emergency services.
A San Benito County communications agent said that the phone outages in Santa Cruz and Santa Clara counties have no effect on 911 emergency services for San Benito County.
“Everything is fine,” said Beth Kafer, communications manager with the San Benito County Sheriff’s Office. “We had no outage and no delay in duties.”
Kafer said the dispatch office made calls to many locations all over the county and had those people call 911 to test the service. She said there weren’t any problems when people called back.
“We are fully operable and suffered no outage.”
San Benito County runs its phones through a main router located in Salinas, which was not affected.
The cutting of the cable caused service problems across Santa Clara, San Benito and Santa Cruz counties, according to city staff and AT&T.
“We anticipate some service restoration will begin in next few hours with repairs and rerouting efforts continuing this afternoon,” AT&T posted to it’s official Twitter news account at 11 a.m. “We apologize for any inconvenience this morning’s service has caused. We are working on a repair. We have crews on the scene.”
AT&T told officials it estimates the cable will be repaired about 6 p.m.
The company also now says it is offering a $100,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of anyone involved.
While some local calls were working as of mid-morning, cell phone calls on the Verizon, Nextel and Sprint networks were still not working and local Internet services were still out. Some calls were working on AT&T and its data plan was up.
Emergency calls to 911 were interrupted by the outage, but phone crews had plans to reroute all 911 calls through local seven-digit numbers, police dispatchers said about 11 a.m. At 9 a.m., police activated it’s Emergency Operations Center to coordinate a response to the outage and stationed officers throughout the city to deal with residents’ needs, according to dispatchers and a city press release.
Gilroy Police brought in five extra officers on the anti-crime team and three detectives to double the amount of officers patrolling the streets.
However, no major incidents occurred as of 2 p.m.
“There haven’t been any more people coming in (to the police station) than normal,” Sgt. Jim Gillio said. “We went out and notified the major institutions in town this morning. We’ve had nothing out of the ordinary.”
Gilroy Police encouraged residents to go to the nearest police or fire station in the case of emergencies. Fire stations – which law enforcement are staffing with emergency medical personnel – are located at 7070 Chestnut St., 880 Sunrise Drive, and at the corner of Wren and Welburn avenues. The police department is at 7301 Hanna St. and Saint Louise Regional Hospital is on No Name Uno in northeast Gilroy.
Long lines formed at South Valley National Bank on First Street as security concerns heightened during the outage, said bank Manager Kurt Michielssen. Because of problems with the security system and ATMs not being operational, bank employees were only letting only one or two people into the bank at a time.
However, there had been no problems as of 11:15 a.m. and police “personally went to every bank in the city,” according to a dispatcher.
Still, Chase Bank was taking precautions and was closed most of the morning.
“We’ve had minor power outages but nothing like this,” said Chase employee Steven Quistian, who has been working there since September. “The police told us we couldn’t open because of security. We’ve just been cleaning and having meetings until it opens again.”
Quistian said his manager planned to open the bank for a few customers at a time to withdraw money and process the transactions by hand.
Meanwhile, eateries were struggling to deal with onslaught of customers. Gilroy’s First Street Coffee and Subway, among other businesses, were forced to deal with cash only as their credit card systems were made inoperable
At the coffee shop, they had even turned to dealing with a much older system of credit.
“Most of our customers are repeat customers,” said owner Konni Thomas. “About 25 to 35 percent of our customers said they would pay double tomorrow.”
Thomas and her daughter, Kassi Swalboski, had people coming in all morning speculating on the cause of the outage. They said they heard anything from a fire to terrorist attacks. AT&T has not specuated on a motive for the vandalism and there have been no indications that the act was related to any sort of terrorist attack.
“I’m not sure why anyone would want to attack Gilroy,” Swalboski said. “We’ve seen of new faces coming in this morning wondering what was going on. But not many are buying coffee.”
While most people were accepting of the situation some were quite upset.
“We been seeing a mixed response,” Swalboski said. “Some people have been mad, even at us. One guy said he lost $1,000.”
Yet, for most customers, the outage was more of a disruption.
“It’s hasn’t affected my work but it has definitely affected my volunteer responsibilities,” said Mary Beth Anderson, who works from home and does volunteer work in Gilroy. “I’m just glad I’m not trying to deliver a baby today.”
“In a job place, you can live without a phone, but you can’t live without the internet,” said Norma Ludergnani, who planned to drive to Hollister for work today. “I don’t know what the high school kids are going to do during breaks. They’ll have to talk the old-fashioned way.”
AT&T reported that an area cable had been cut and that it was “impacting services in Santa Clara and San Jose areas.”
“We anticipate some service restoration will begin in next few hours with repairs and rerouting efforts continuing this afternoon,” the company posted to it’s official Twitter news account at 11 a.m. “We apologize for any inconvenience this morning’s service has caused. We are working on a repair. We have crews on the scene.”
While some local calls were working as of mid-morning, cell phone calls on the Verizon network were still not working and Internet services were still out. Some calls were working on AT&T and its data plan was up.
Emergency calls to 911 were interrupted by the outage, but phone crews had plans to reroute all 911 calls through local seven-digit numbers, police dispatchers said about 11 a.m.
If residents have an emergency, they can call 846-0350 or 842-0191.
Nathan Mixter and Chris Bone contributed reporting to this article.
