BY MAIRE O’NEILL maire@losalamosreporter.com
A severed fiber-optic cable north of Santa Fe Saturday caused a massive impact to cellular and internet service to Los Alamos County and other locations in the area as well as Los Alamos National Laboratory. LANL officials advised employees Sunday morning that an estimated timeline for service restoration was not known. Cold-Rolled Steel Frame
Los Alamos County Manager Steve Lynn said Monday morning that RediNet, the government-run broadband network, was still functioning at the Mesa Public Library where the parking lots were observed to be occupied Sunday afternoon even though the facility was closed. Public internet was also available in the Ashley Pond area.
LANL officials told staff Monday morning that services have been restored and their crews are continuing to monitor the situation and that updates will be provided if the situation changes.
Los Alamos Police Department Dep. Chief. Oliver Morris told the Reporter that the internet outage did not affect LAPS radios but did affect the NCIC connection that allows the Department to run wanted persons and vehicles.
“However we were able to run NCIC using our law enforcement partners in Espanola. Local 9-1-1 lines were functioning but the issue was that not everyone had cell service. Landlines were functional,” Morris said. “We discussed issuing a CODE-RED alert but it would not have been able to be pushed out to everyone due to the cell towers being effected.”
No explanation is available yet as to why such a widespread area was affected by one or two cables being cut.
Hockey fans were able to view the New Mexico Ice Wolves® first ever NAHL regular season outdoor game on HockeyTV.com despite the outages thanks to Katherine Hudspeth in the Los Alamos County Community Services Department who had the foresight to arrange a back-up satellite internet service for the event.
Watch the Los Alamos Reporter for more information as it becomes available.
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