Pagliughi

Avalon mayor Martin Pagliughi wants answers about why Verizon left hundreds of residences and businesses on the Seven Mile Island with intermittent phone service for more than a week, with no notification or explanation forthcoming from the telephone company.

The service outage, which began Oct. 28, extended all the way until Nov. 8, forcing customers to endure incomplete calls, one-sided conversations, and other problems.

Verizon blamed a piece of failing equipment for the outage — a technology card installed at a switching office in central New Jersey.  The result was disrupted service for residents of both Avalon and neighboring Stone Harbor, and Verizon officials never realized it.

Verizon officials claimed technicians missed the failing card because an alarm on the card never sounded.  Dozens of complaints from customers were ignored by Verizon customer service representatives.

Pagluighi wants to know how this could have happened.

“It was very troubling to me that in an era of mass telecommunications and putting men on the moon that Verizon could not be aware of a big problem in Avalon and Stone Harbor while dozens of complaints were coming into their representatives,” Pagliughi told the Cape May County Herald.

He added that many residents told the borough that when they contacted Verizon to complain about the lack of telephone service, Verizon reps told them their complaint was the first one from Avalon.

“This outage is not only about an inconvenience to our community, it’s really about a critical public safety issue,” Pagliughi said. “It’s time for utilities that make a lucrative business in our communities to have a greater level of accountability for the services they are paid to provide,” he said.

The mayor met with public safety officials and representatives from Verizon to create a plan to prevent a repeat occurrence.  Had the winter storm that barreled up the east coast over the weekend struck at the same time as the phone outage, public safety could have been at risk.

The newspaper reports the parties agreed to take the following actions:

• A total replacement of the technology card that failed during the telephone outage. The card will be replaced by technicians sometime during January 2011 with no anticipated interruption of telephone service;
• Verizon will draft a plan that will result in greater recognition of a community-wide problem along with proper notification of emergency management authorities in the affected region;
• A special practice “drill” will be conducted involving county and municipal emergency management officials that will test Verizon’s new contingency plan to notify a community when a phone outage occurs;
• Verizon will arrange a field trip during the first quarter of 2011 so local officials can talk with staff at a local field office to discuss communication efforts between the utility and local emergency management officials.