Utility regulators grill Frontier Communications about service outage in northern Arizona

Frontier Communications executives were grilled by the Arizona Corporation Commission members investigating a service outage that lasted about 48 hours across swaths of rural Navajo and Apache counties earlier this month. 

After calls from local leaders, the commission is likely to move forward with a court order that would require Frontier to appear and justify its practices against challenges that the company failed to meet its obligations. 

Authorities can connect at least one death to the outage, which cut off contact between tens of thousands of people and emergency services dispatchers.

Public safety officials testifying before regulators Tuesday described the chaos caused by interrupted service.

St. Johns police chief Lance Spivey described situations of three other injured people who were unable to call 911 or access services at hospitals that also were affected by the outage, which occurred between June 11 and 13.

"St. Johns is unique. We have one service provider that provides telephone and internet, and that's Frontier," Spivey said. "So if Frontier goes down, everything else goes down." 

The outage started after shotgun blasts damaged two areas of exposed fiber optic cable over a three-mile stretch between Snowflake and Holbrook, said Kevin Saville, general legal counsel for Frontier.

"This was not a network failure," Saville said. "This was at a minimum vandalism and even potentially sabotage." 

Previously: Congressman calls for AG, FCC investigations into rural Arizona outages

Saville said while the damage to the cable structure was severe, phone and 911 service for Frontier customers was out only for about an hour while the network was down for repairs.  

Only some internet and the service Frontier provides to third parties was impacted for the 48-hour period, Saville said.

But as the assistant fire chief in St. Johns, Jason Kirk, would point out later in the meeting, the third parties that rely on Frontier include the majority of the people living in this area of northern Arizona. 

"The backbone of every Verizon cell tower, most of the infrastructure — including gas pumps, grocery stores and other facilities — was rendered useless because of the unavailability of the fiber connection," Kirk said. 

"And while I won't necessarily say that they're responsible for the acts of others, I definitely believe they have responsibility in the restoration of those services and a proper 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."

During questioning from the commissioners, Mark Jeffries, a local manager for Frontier, provided a rough overview of Frontier's response to the outage.

Jeffries' recap of the response described some of the time-consuming factors of making these repairs, like hours of driving to remote areas and having to replace large amounts of cable, as well as technicians having to work for more than 24 hours straight.

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Commissioners expressed concern about a potential lack of urgency in the company's response to the outage and requested that Frontier submit a more detailed hour-by-hour account of its actions.

"I've heard from local officials. They've reported that Frontier did not have any urgency responding to the June 11 outage in Navajo and Apache counties and was unwilling to assist in resolving the situation," Commissioner Sandra Kennedy said.

"That is my concern for an hour-by-hour recap on what the company did." 

The commissioners have also requested that Frontier provide its established protocols for responding to emergency scenarios and a detailed list of who the company contacted during the outage and when. 

The commissioners all agreed that there should be an emergency town hall meeting in St. Johns at which the community could express its concerns to Frontier. The company has committed to having meaningful representation in-person for the discussion. 

"We may not regulate internet, but by gosh, we're going to try to help the folks out who need our help who are complaining about your company," Kennedy told Saville toward the end of the meeting.

The date and time of the town hall was still being determined by the commission. The court order, known as an order to show cause, was being drafted and was expected to be voted on at a later meeting. 

Coverage of northern Arizona on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is funded by the nonprofit Report for America and a grant from the the Vitalyst Health Foundation in association with The Arizona Republic.

Contact northern Arizona reporter Lacey Latch at llatch@gannett.com or on social media @laceylatch.