Cindy Tomlinson, with Bend Broadband’s parent company TDS Telecom, says size of the outage was due to where the crash occurred. "We have some primary fiber lines that are adjacent to our central operations that were cut. Where that cut occurred was at a critical point. Because of the close proximity to our main office, it caused the outage to be widespread."

 

More than 20,000 customers lost phone service for much of the day, 17,000 of them also lost cable and Internet service, which led to headaches for businesses and individuals across Central Oregon.

 

Tomlinson says the company is investigating how to better protect the pole at Empire and Nels Anderson, and the fiber line. "We just can’t prepare for what might happen, but we can and are continuing to look at what we can do to add more protections around where that pole is located. Our teams will continue to assess the situation and to identify how we might add greater protections to that area."