UPDATE: Salinas city phone service restored
UPDATE 12/16/14 5:12p.m.: All phone services restored at city departments in Salinas. The cause of most of the outage was flooding, which damaged a phone circuit board at the city permit center. That in turn caused the failure of a circuit board at city hall, which interrupted some connections there and at the Police Department, and all connections at the Animal Shelter, El Gabilan Library and the recreation centers.
The cause of the Public Services Yard outage was a downed line.
About 100 City phone lines were affected by the outage.
12/15/14: In Salinas, the recent storms knocked out phone service for some city offices over the past few days.
Finance director of Salinas Matt Pressey said, “We had our phone system went down after accessing. It was a partial outage here at City Hall and at the police station, just some of the lines are down.”
Pressey said he has been trying to keep up with phone problems since Thursday’s storm hit. About 100 of the city’s 600 phone lines have been affected at some point.
Some of those affected locations include the police department, where only some phone lines, affecting non-emergency calls only were affected. Also affected were phone lines at the Salinas animal shelter and El Gabilan library.
“People who call in, they’re able to leave messages and some of our staff have been able to access voice mail, but others not, so there may be a delay in people getting back to residents who call in,” said Pressey.
Since Friday, crews have replaced some equipment to get city phones working. Some phones still aren’t working, like one phone at El Gabilan library.
Denise Cabrera, a librarian at El Gabilan said,
“One of our lines is not working, and when patrons call, it’s really hard, it’s really hard for us to hear them. it’s really badly staticky.”
For now, the librarian said it may be easier for people to contact them on their library website, but she said library employees are doing their best to work around the problems.
City hall officials are hopeful all the city’s phone lines will be back up by Tuesday morning.
