By Brenda Starkey
Chronicle correspondent

     Ferry County was thrown into a communications blackout Tuesday afternoon, April 15, when a work crew installing guard rail west of Wauconda Summit on Highway 20 broke a fiber optics line, officials say.
     The incident, which affected Internet, cell phone service and long-distance telephone capabilities, happened at 2:02 p.m. Long-distance and cell service were restored by 5 a.m. Wednesday, according to a Verizon spokesman.
     Service to some areas was restored earlier as lines were spliced back into the cable, he said.
     Cable Internet service from the Republic TV Association began coming back online around 4 p.m., a spokesperson said.
     “Not having those capabilities, we didn’t know what was going on right away, because no one could contact us,” said Ferry County undersheriff Greg Palmier.
     The work crew apparently was putting in posts to replace guard rail that had been knocked out when a pickup truck went off the road, and one of those posts broke the fiber optic line, he said.
     The sheriff’s department was in contact by radio. The state Emergency Operations Center and Okanogan County Sheriff’s Office handled 911 calls for Ferry County, officials said.
     “When they went down we acted as a secondary PSAP – public safety answering point,” said Okanogan County sheriff Frank Rogers. “Their 911 calls were routed to Okanogan County during the outage. We are not sure of how long they were down; we know it was several hours.”
     A major concern was that there would be some sort of medical emergency or other problem that required communication with outside resources, but once radio contact with the EOC was established, that problem was solved temporarily, Palmier said.
     The EOC contacted area television stations with instructions for residents to contact the sheriff’s office through its 775-3132 phone number.
     Normal non-long distance calls were not affected by the outage, he said.
     Area businesses could not process credit cards, which require long distance communications, nor do anything else that required communication outside the immediate area. Purchases were by cash or check only.
     Palmier said when he first discovered the outage he tried to use a satellite phone that is kept in his patrol vehicle. While it gave him four bars for a few seconds, it almost immediately lost that signal.
     “I drove all around and couldn’t find a signal,” he said, explaining that he tried various hills and other locations to no avail.
     When he parked back at the sheriff’s office, the signal mysteriously appeared again and he gave the phone to the 911 center.
     He said what really hit him as he was driving around was that people appeared to be going about their normal business without much concern.
     “We learn that living out here we have to be prepared for outages,” he said. “We know to keep stocked up on basic and emergency supplies. So, when we lose something it’s just not a huge catastrophe.”