Journal staff report

Phones and internet were out for San Juan County residents Aug. 19 after an oversized load going west on Stevenson Road in Anacortes clipped overhanging cables, causing a CenturyLink outage.

The outage lasted for a day, and took out Rock Island, CLINK, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint phone and internet services. Verizon was the only one unaffected, as well as a few Rock Island customers. Rock Island is a reseller of CenturyLink services. OPALCO acquired Rock Island earlier this year in Feb. 2015.

According to OPALCO’s Suzanne Olson, this outage fared much better than the 2013 outage caused by a car collision. After that outage Rock Island compiled a list of essential groups such as grocery stores and hospitals of who to contact immediately. Olson said on Orcas Island people were going door to door to inform people about the situation.

Sound Publishing received this statement from Rock Island Communications’ Gerry Lawlor on Wednesday, Aug. 19:

“We are experiencing a major outage on the county wide communication network. This is due to a car hitting a major and knocking down a utility pole in the Anacortes area. This is affect all major carriers (Ourselves, CLINK, T-Mobile, ATT, Sprint) except VZ from what we can gather. This is going to be an outage for a few hours we suspect. Some in county may be able to make in county calls but we are seeing some landline issues. DSL is down.”

We will update as soon as we hear anything new.