Cut cable causes internet, phone outage in small Nebraska town

LINCOLN, Neb. (KLKN) –  For many of us, our mobile device is our lifeline, and we would feel lost without it.

For many residents of Panama, the landline is their lifeline, and they have been without service for more than four days.

Lyle Mulver lives about 15 miles southeast of Lincoln and is in his 80s. He doesn’t own a cellphone and says, “Everything that we do is on the landline.”

He goes to cancer treatments three days a week and says he speaks with his doctors several times throughout the week about treatment and lab results.

“What’s really concerning is how they are going to get a hold of us,” he said. “Our niece and nephew tried to call us several times and were wondering what was going on.”

Lyle’s grandson has lent him a cellphone in the meantime, and he’s been using it to contact his service provider, Windstream, which operates under the Kinetic brand, but his efforts have not gotten him far.

“Every time I call, I just get a recording. It says, ‘we’re aware of the problem, and it’ll be fixed by tonight at 8 p.m.,'” said Mulver, who adds, “Then, it’ll change to ‘It’ll be fixed by Monday,’ and we still have no phone service at all.”

The Mulvers aren’t dealing with this alone; they tell me it was discussed after church on Sunday, when most of the neighborhood attends.

“A company that big doesn’t have a troubleshooting crew? To get someone out here and fix it, or at least, tell you when,” he said.

A few houses away, the Barnot family wants it fixed.

“I wish they would just figure out what it is and get it done because it’s kind of messing up everyone’s lives around here,” said Craig Barnot.

Christaan Schroeder, Barnot’s grandson, says the town of Panama is no stranger to outages, but this is different.

“This is by far the worst it’s been,” he said. “Most crews will have some kind of on-call line for emergency cases, but I haven’t heard of or seen anything remotely related to calling people past-hours.”

He explains that it used to take 24-48 hours to address an outage, and now it can take up to a week.

Schroeder says the company doesn’t understand what it means for people in a small town like Panama.

“There are students, people who work from home, and there are people whose papers exist solely online. If those people are cut off from those resources, you are effectively affecting their life, their livelihood,” he said.

“This is a big problem that impacts the entire town; that is an unacceptable lapse in judgment for the company,” said Schroeder.

A spokesman for Uniti Group, which merged with Windstream in August, said the outage is “the result of a cable cut caused by a third-party contractor working for another company.”

“Our crews are on site and expect to have service restored by the end of the day barring unforeseen complications,” the spokesman said.  “We apologize for any inconvenience our customers have experienced.”