CITY OF LOCKPORT: City hall phone service on the fritz Monday

Local News

June 16, 2009

Staff Reports The Lockport Union-Sun %26 Journal Tue Jun 16, 2009, 12:24 AM EDT

Phone service at City Hall remained unavailable Monday after a system failure late last week.

City staff members report losing phone service suddenly mid-Friday. The phones in city and city court offices haven’t rung since, according to Mayor Michael Tucker. Anyone trying to call a city office has received a continuous busy signal.

The city’s phone service vendor, Choice One, still didn’t have the cause of the problem diagnosed Monday.

From his city-supplied cell phone Monday afternoon, Tucker complained to a Choice One customer service representative that the technician the company had dispatched Friday to investigate hadn’t brought any diagnostic equipment with him.

“We’re a city of 22,000 people, our government is effectively shut down and nobody can tell us what the hell’s going on,” he said. “It’s not the first time we’ve had a problem with this (service).”

The sudden loss was especially dramatic at the Lockport Police Department on Friday. According to Tucker, a police officer happened to be on a general line with a caller threatening to harm himself when the line went dead. The officer used his personal cell phone to call the person back and talk him down.

911 service has not been affected by the outage, Tucker said, but some local residents use direct office numbers, rather than 911, to communicate with the police and/or fire departments.

Meanwhile, city and court clerical staff were concerned Monday about the number — and tone — of phone calls they’ll take once service is restored.

“People think we ignore the phones now; we don’t,” a court clerk said. “Imagine how (angry) they’re going to be when they finally get through.”

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