Damage to equipment owned by Frontier Communications left residents in remote Apache and Navajo Counties without cell or internet service for approximately 48 hours. As AZCentral.com reports, a man in need of medical assistance died on the way to the hospital after onlookers were unable to use their cell phones to call for help. By the time Good Samaritans were able to flag down an ambulance, the responders were too late to save the individual’s life. Authorities added that a young child who accidentally impaled herself with a curtain rod was also stranded without emergency care, but that incident did not result in a fatality.
St. Johns Police Chief Lance Spivey spoke negatively about Frontier, saying that this sort of crisis is not unusual. “My hope is that Frontier leaves the area, goes out of business,” he said. “They have jeopardized public safety. If this was to happen in the Valley, it’d be different because there’s so many more people that live down there there’d be outrage and all kinds of stuff. But we’re small and rural so we get stuck with a company that really doesn’t care. They put dollars above names, above people.”
Although Frontier did not choose to comment at this time, the company did provide this statement: “Frontier is offering up to $10K for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the individual(s) who vandalized Frontier-owned communication lines in Navajo County, Arizona that led to an outage in the community last weekend.”
Spivey was less restrained, sharing a public letter with the Arizona Corporation Commission blasting Frontier for not doing enough to address ongoing problems. He called Frontier’s efforts “quite simply insufficient and inadequate and blatantly jeopardizing public safety.”
Although the current situation is part of an ongoing investigation, earlier this year, the Commission reviewed Frontier’s record over the past few years and found 66 hours of 911 service interruptions since April 2020. “Frontier demonstrated that while it was prepared to respond to outages,” the Commission determined, “It appeared not to be doing enough to prevent the outages.” A new statewide call-handling system is taking some of the onus off Frontier, though the company remains a vital part of the communications equation, AZCentral.com reported.
Following the 48 hour outage, business owner Mandi Huth submitted her own complaint to the Commission, stating, “As small business owners who rely on the internet, it is detrimental to our income when services go down. That we can deal with … What we will not deal with is having 911 services in our community go down and our cell phones go down, our resource to call 911,” Huth noted, adding, “This is unacceptable. I am asking each of you to consider what it would mean to you and to your family if you needed emergency services and were unable to reach them due to a utility company who puts profits over people.”
Reader Interactions