Phone service restored near Medimont

By RALPH BARTHOLDT

Staff Writer

When Mike Schlepp tried to call his Medimont neighbors last week, he noticed his phone was dead.

There was no dial tone.

The idea of not being able to call anyone along the State 3 corridor from Rose Lake to the Harrison junction, a distance of 22 miles, and north to Harrison, was disconcerting.

When Schlepp, a Lane rancher, tried to notify his carrier, Frontier Communications, he was told his service was fine.

“I got on the website and reported the outage,” Schlepp said. “They told me I didn’t have an outage.”

After five days of living without landline telephone service in the no-man’s land of spotty cellphone coverage along the Coeur d’Alene River Valley, Frontier Communications on Monday afternoon restored service to its 500-plus users from Rose Lake to Harrison.

The Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office, which communicated with the company earlier in the day, said Frontier blamed the lack of service on a broken underground cable.

“They said they had a broken line somewhere, but they did not know where,” sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Ryan Higgins said Monday. “The (residents) really have no communication out there.”

His department worked with the Shoshone County fire protection district, which sent an officer to the Medimont fire hall Friday in case of an emergency.

Phone service was restored after the sheriff’s office notified Frontier.

Frontier Communications public information officers issued a news release late Monday that stated a utility contractor using boring equipment had damaged a phone line along Highway 97, which disrupted telephone service to customers in communities near Harrison and St. Maries.

“Frontier crews have repaired the damage, and service has been restored as of 4:30 p.m. today. We thank our customers for their patience,” Javier Mendoza of Frontier Communications said.

Having the landline at the Valley Mart in Medimont ring around 4 p.m. made Suzanne Reasor happy.

The Medimont gas station and convenience store that once doubled as a post office and still functions as a regional meeting place, had neighbors show up to grouse about the lack of phone service.

“If there was an emergency nobody could call for help,” Reasor said. “That is what was concerning.”

The mountains that bank both sides of the valley have no cell tower, Reasor said. Cellphone service is spotty at best.

“You have to go in the yard and stand in the right spot,” she said.

Some people have cellphone boosters, and many, especially the elderly, don’t have WiFi.

“If there was a fire, they couldn’t even call for help,” Reasor said.

Susan Rodgers, who lives across Cave Lake from the Medimont store, said the telephone service at her house was interrupted Friday.

“Sometime after 10 a.m.,” Rodgers said.

When she called operators on her cellphone — she called using WiFi — they told her that her phone was not listed as out of service.

“They issued me a repair ticket for Friday, Aug. 16,” she said.

The phone company told her friends they would be out of service until Aug. 21, she said, but an operator on Saturday confirmed there had been two outages that included between 369 and 458 customers.

Even though the service was restored Monday afternoon, the cause of the interruption and the lack of a logical explanation — of any communication at all — has Frontier customers along the corridor in Southeast Kootenai County befuddled.

“It was kind of getting spooky for the elderly,” Schlepp said.

And the five-day outage was more than a hiccup for businesses like the Valley Mart, which was left without phone service during the busiest business days of the week.

“We usually get a lot of pizza orders on the weekend,” Reasor said.