Six-day phone and internet outage was preventable

David Colburn

GREANEY — Frontier Communications customers in the Greaney area were without internet or phone service for six days this past week, but had the company responded to multiple requests from a contractor to move the line, the major disruption to families and businesses would have been avoided.
Angora-based KGM Contractors was working on a St. Louis County Public Works project last week to install a large culvert on Willow River Rd. about five-and-a-half miles west of the Gheen corner on Hwy. 54 when an excavator severed the Frontier line, knocking out service to 49 residential and business customers, including Ruth and John Huismann, who live south of Greaney.
“I’m so fed up with Frontier,” Ruth Huismann said on Tuesday. “Two weeks ago, we were without phone or internet for three days. It’s a constant with them. It’s disrupted everything. I’ve been trying to get ahold of Frontier because I’m canceling this house phone. I got a cellphone, and I don’t need it. Just this morning, when it finally came back on, I went online and ordered Starlink.”
Huismann spent days worrying about whether she would be able to do payroll for her husband’s drilling business, which she does through an online payroll service.
“I wouldn’t have been able to do payroll today – I would’ve had to call the bank and ask them to do a transfer,” Huismann said.
Another business affected by the outage was the guide service operated by Dennis Udovich. He told the Timberjay on Tuesday that with bear season fast approaching it’s a busy time for his business, and the outage prevented customers from reaching him.
“Six solid days without service. Everything was dead,” Udovich said.
When the service was restored early Tuesday morning, Udovich discovered just how much of an inconvenience it had been.
“We were getting calls like crazy when it came back,” he said.
Frontier’s neglect
While people are often quick to point to the contractor in a situation like this, the Timberjay obtained a series of 18 emails from St. Louis County, dating back to April 1. The messages documented KGM’s months-long effort to get Frontier to temporarily relocate the line outside of the construction zone. Frontier never moved the line, but on Aug. 13, Frontier network engineer Steven Sanders gave KGM the green light to begin digging.
“We will not hold you up from starting on the 18th regardless of whether or not we are temped/relocated,” Sanders wrote. “I was able to find as-builts of our existing facilities and according to our records we should be ten feet below the creek bottom. I originally wanted to temp or relocate those lines since I cannot be 100 percent sure that they are that deep, and more often than not we aren’t, but due to the difficulties we’ve faced with the excessive amount of storm damage, we were not able to do that in a timely manner.”
Sanders’ primary email contact at KGM was engineer Tom Kvas, and the pair met on April 7 to look at the lines and agree on plans. In an email later that day, Kvas indicated that they were hopeful the line would be relocated by mid-June.
But in early May, the Camp House fire near Brimson ignited, and after being combined with the Jenkins Creek fire and renamed the Brimson Complex Fire, the blaze consumed over 28,000 acres and destroyed or damaged more than 140 buildings. With Frontier providing service in that area, the damage strained their response capability.
“Outages take the priority,” Sanders told the Timberjay on Tuesday. “And outages are not something that that we can plan – we don’t know from any given time of how much resources are going to be needed for that.”
In a May 27 email, Sanders told Kvas that the relocation work would likely be delayed to mid-July.
Kvas sent four emails over the next month and a half requesting timeline updates before Sanders finally replied on July 18, indicating that “they were able to get all the services restored in Brimson this week, so they were going to transition over to Willow River Rd. after that.”
After two more unanswered emails requesting updates, Kyler Schneider of KGM stepped in and sent another on Aug. 4 emphasizing the urgency of getting started on the project.
“Can you please update us on your schedule for the relocation on this job?” Schneider wrote. “We understand you guys are busy, but we need some sort of communication to understand what we need to do to proceed. We have subcontractors calling trying to schedule their work and suppliers calling wanting the product out of their laydown yards.”
Kvas followed up the next day, telling Sanders that KGM needed to get started by Aug. 11 to meet their deadline. Another email and two days later, Sanders responded that Frontier would not be able to complete the relocation by the 11th, with the “best case scenario” looking like Aug. 15. Kvas was firm but measured in his reply.
“Any delay in the project due to you not being able to get these cables out of our way will be back billed to Frontier,” Kvas wrote. “Our precon meeting was almost over 4 months ago and now we are at the final completion dates of the project and this is the response? We sure hope you can do better than this.”
Schneider followed up on Aug. 12, emphasizing that a bus route for ISD 2142 St. Louis County Schools would be disrupted if the work was not completed before the first day of school on Sept. 2.
Faced with mounting pressure and schematics showing the line was buried ten feet deep, Sanders decided to give the go-ahead to start digging. He also arranged for a workaround in the event the line was severed. A company subcontractor would come out to install empty conduit outside of the work zone that would give Frontier a route to feed new cable to restore service quickly.
“I gave quite a bit of consideration of what was best for everyone in the situation at that time,” Sanders said. “There was definitely a lot of a lot of thought involved in making that decision, and it wasn’t a whatever happens, happens, kind of scenario.”
Unfortunately, the bore crew sent to install the conduit encountered some difficulties and had to get a bigger rig to do the work, and the line was severed before the conduit was installed, short-circuiting the plan for a speedy fix.
“It was a situation where we believed from the beginning that we would be out of conflict (with the work zone) and had intentions of taking precautionary measures,” Sanders said. “Because of the circumstances we discussed, it didn’t happen. I was doing everything that I possibly could to not have what happened happen. It was a total accident.”