ST JOHNS, Arizona — The Arizona Corporation Commission is having staff draft a list of steps Frontier Communications will need to take to prevent similar outages to one earlier this month in northeast Arizona.
On June 11, a fiber line belonging to the utility company was shot by a shotgun, according to the Navajo County Sheriff's Office.
The damage left people in Navajo and Apache counties without internet and disrupted 911 service.
'Public safety disaster'
For years, Frontier Communications has been providing service to rural areas of Arizona.
While recognizing the damage is out of the utility company's control, public safety leaders have condemned Frontier's response.
"I'm dealing with the aftermath of the public safety disaster because my ambulance company was not able to respond to my citizens based on the failures of a communication system," St. Johns Emergency Services Assistant Fire Chief Jason Kirk said.
The internet was out for days, calls were affected, including 911 service.
"A person died because their wife couldn't use the phone," St. Johns Police Chief Lance Spivey said.
Frontier Communications said their customers weren't able to reach 911 for about an hour on Sunday.
"Wireless providers, in particular, did have outages and their 911 services were impacted as a result of damage to our cable facility," Kevin Saville, counsel for Frontier Communications told the Arizona Corporation Commission on Tuesday.
Kirk told the Arizona Corporation Commission that his fire department didn't have data for more than 47 hours.
“I definitely believe that they have responsibility in the restoration of those services and a prompt response to this, other than saying, 'Our 911 service was only down for an hour and a half," Kirk said. "The citizens were separated from communications and data for almost two days."
Not the first time
The Arizona Corporation Commission already found earlier this year that Frontier Communications had significant outages, lasting hours to days across parts of the state they serve.
In a decision filed in March, the utility company was told to make plans to improve the system to stop the outages.
Travis Jensen with the Arizona Department of Administration's 911 program told the commission Frontier Communications is the only company that has not switched over to the new Comtech system.
"These issues, like what came up a few weeks ago, can still be issues going forward if they don't provide redundancy to their system," Jensen said.
Frontier Communications said creating redundancy is expensive and argued no company has complete redundancy across their system.
Working toward changes
The Arizona Corporation Commission didn't vote on any issues in the meeting Tuesday, but they did direct staff to draft a memo and proposed remedy order.
Staff was told to include in the memo and remedy order that Frontier Communications be told to connect with the ADOA Comtech system, including an emergency response plan, pursue state and federal funds to create redundancy and diversity, as well as be required to update on the commission on their progress bi-weekly.
The draft is also to include that the utility company needs to identify where there isn't redundancy and diversity in their system and have senior executives be required to attend emergency town halls with the community.
The commission asked that enforcement provisions be included in the order, in the event that Frontier Communications doesn't comply.
"We need something done," Spivey said. "You can't put numbers on lives."
The commission is also working to secure a date in the next few weeks to go to St. Johns for an Emergency Town Hall meeting to hear from people there directly about these outage issues.
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