Phone, internet service outage in multiple counties

Socorro County experienced an outage of cell phone and internet service on February 12.

Socorro County Manager Andy Lotrich said one of the main optical wires operated by Lumen was severed in an undisclosed location, causing the outage that impacted Socorro County and six other surrounding counties.

“Socorro County was the first county in the seven-county area that this outage impacted we set up the Emergency Operations Center,” Lotrich said.

The Emergency Operations Center was set up in Socorro County to coordinate services and expedite the process of getting the outage fixed, said Lotrich.

“We were in the process of setting up the emergency tower, but Lumen was able to get the line fixed before the tower became operational,” Lotrich said.

With the train derailment happening on the heels of the outage, Lotrich said it was a busy couple of days for his emergency crew.

“I had barely taken the guys off of emergency duty when we got the call about the train, so my emergency operation team over the last 48 hours has put in approximately 36 hours of work,” Lotrich said.

During the outage, some customers were not impacted, such as the Socorro Public Library, which served as a hotspot and location for people to connect to the Internet.

According to Lotrich the outage was resolved, and all services were repaired and deemed operational by approximately 12:01 a.m. on the 13th, at which point the Emergency Operations Center was closed.