Road work mishap temporarily shut down internet, TV, phones

Aug. 20, 2022  |  By Lisa Scagliotti 

A mishap along the VTrans road construction project on Route 2 was the cause of a town-wide outage of internet and phone service for Comcast customers recently in Waterbury. 

Shortly before 10 a.m. on the morning of Friday, Aug. 12, internet, cable TV and phone service for Comcast customers went off. Customers were notified that repairs were under way but would take hours. 

The interruption affected residential and business customers across Waterbury. Some stores were unable to process credit card payments, others didn’t have working telephones. 

“Please bring cash,” Jimmz Pizza wrote to followers on Facebook. 

Waterbury Veterinary Hospital directed clients with pet emergencies to clinics in Williston and Burlington. Those seeking to use the Waterbury Public Library’s usually reliable internet found service was off there, too.

A company spokeswoman for Comcast on Thursday confirmed that the outage stemmed from a cable break during road work along U.S. Route 2. 

“The fiber optic got hit – that’s the main backbone of our network,” explained Elizabeth Walden at Comcast. “We’re constantly monitoring service and saw it immediately and got a crew out to resolve it.” 

Tom Mancini, project engineer on the ongoing Middlesex/Moretown repaving project, confirmed the mishap. Workers with a subcontractor on the project were working on a guardrail section near the Moretown landfill. 

“They hit a buried line when installing a guardrail anchor,” Mancini said. “I do not believe that there were any dig-safe marks in this area indicating the line.”

The outage did not affect state offices in Waterbury. State Secretary of Digital Services John Quinn said building redundancy into communications infrastructure would be helpful when situations such as this arise. 

“I believe Gov. [Phil] Scott’s plan to bring more fiber internet options to Vermont may assist with issues like this in the future as the Community Broadband Board assists local Communication Union Districts with grants for offering and expanding internet options across Vermont,” he said.

Service after the incident was restored by late afternoon.