On December 3, the San Juan County Council sent the following letter to Tim Gigar, Vice-President for CenturyTel of Washington, regarding “Centurylink Customer Credit- San Juan County Outage”
The letter, signed by County Councilmen Rick Hughes, Bob Jarman and Jamie Stephens, reads:
Dear Mr. Gigar:
The residents and businesses of San Juan County experienced an abrupt and prolonged interruption of service due to the failure of the fiber optic submarine cable that runs between San Juan and Lopez Islands on November 5, 2013. The failure impacted a host of services including but not limited to E911 service, fire alarms, credit card transactions, Wireless, as well as local and long distance phone calls. The severity of the service interruption prompted the San Juan County Council to declare a state of emergency (SJC Res. 28-2013) and mobilize resources to undertake a number of activities including public notification and remote locating dispatch services to Orcas and Lopez Islands.
The interruption in service has no doubt had an economic impact on Island businesses and on residents who paid for but did not receive Centurylink services in the month of November.
Therefore, the San Juan County Council requests that Centurylink provide a credit or remittance to its San Juan County customers.
Thank you for your consideration.
Kudos to the Council. That is quite a remarkable piece of advocacy on the part of their citizens – as individuals.
I do hope that both the Council and OPALCO will also move forward to advocate on our part as tax-payers and as rate-payers, by insisting on reimbursement for monies spent to provide us with the services when CenturyLink, due to poor maintenance and planning, could not.