Qwest Communications said today that while technicians continue to study the cause of a phone outage Jan. 26 on the North Shore, there are signs that heat under a Duluth street ruined its fiber optics line.
That explanation, first offered by Qwest on the day of the outage, remains a puzzle for Duluth officials and the manager of the Duluth Steam Cooperative, who says there had been little or no contact with Qwest since the line break and Qwest's original explanation that it was caused by a steam pipe rupture.
Manager Jerry Pelofske said there was no steam pipe problem.
The statement today was issued in a letter to Lake and Cook county commissioners, who have criticized the company for not having a backup line to provide service to the North Shore. John Stanoch, the Minnesota president for Qwest, wrote that when employees zeroed in on the problem at Second Avenue and Second Street in Duluth, they found a line "deformed due to what appeared to our crew to be heat damage."
Stanoch said the line has been in place since 1987. When crews responded to the outage, "steam was escaping from two manholes." He wrote that the air temperature in the manhole was "significantly warmer than normal."
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All of that is news to Pelofske. "I haven't seen or heard anything," he said Friday when made aware of Qwest's latest assertions. "No, we did not have a steam line break. We did not have a leak."
Pelofske said he'll have his own crew "go and take a look" to see if anything is out of the norm. He said last week that shortly after the line failure, Duluth Steam workers were called out to locate steam pipes under the streets but that's the only communication it's had with Qwest.
Stanoch's letter did not address a larger question coming from commissioners, public safety officials and customers the past two weeks. They've been wondering why there wasn't a backup line available to reroute communications and get service up quickly.
Qwest spokeswoman Joanna Hjemeland said questions about redundancy are for a "conversation down the road."
The fiber optic line break happened just before 11 a.m. that Tuesday and service wasn't fully restored until around midnight. It affected customers from Two Harbors to Grand Portage who were left without Internet, phone or cell coverage. Hjemeland said the actual time to repair the line wasn't out of the ordinary. "What's unusual is what caused it."
Public safety officials scrambled to find alternative ways to communicate, including two-way and ham radios.
Businesses lost customers and residents worried that they wouldn't get help in case of a medical emergency.
Stanoch reiterated that the outage was "unusual" and that Qwest's analysis of what went wrong is ongoing, especially "because the city has disputed our preliminary assessment of the cause of this damage. We have asked local and out-of-state experts to examine the damaged fiber."
