BEND, OR -- When a semi hit a power pole in northeast Bend yesterday morning (Mon), it knocked out TV, phone and internet service to thousands of Bend Broadband customers in Redmond, Terrebonne, Sisters, Black Butte and Prineville.
A number of telephone customers in Bend and Sunriver were also impacted, including at Sun Country tours. Owner Dennis Oliphant tells KBND News, "There’s not much we can do. Our hope was that we could get calls forwarded – we have 25 cell phones – we wanted to get it forwarded on, but that didn’t happen. Sometimes stuff happens."
Oliphant says, "Mondays are, by far, our busiest day of the week, call volume wise: 40-50 calls an hour. But the phones aren’t ringing today. We’ve had folks check in and say ‘we were lost and tried to call you, and your phones aren’t working!’ Yeah, I have five full-time reservationist who are doing a lot of cleaning around the office and organizing, waiting for the phone service to go back on."
DMV offices across Central Oregon shut down at noon due to the outage. Service was restored by early afternoon, more than eight hours after the crash.
Bend Broadband officials tell KBND they are investigating how one broken power pole could impact 6 communities.