The 911 lines are operational in Calhoun but the admin lines at Calhoun Control, which are used to reach other agencies during an emergency, continue to be on again, off again creating communication issues that could lead to serious problems. Such could have been the case when Grantsville Volunteer Fire Department was dispatched to a structure fire on Yellow Creek Road, Monday, December 26th.
The call came in for a Dawson residence with the report of smoke. With the uncertainty of the cause or degree of fire, Calhoun Control attempted to contact neighboring counties for mutual aid just in case the Grantsville units needed assistance. They attempted to call using the admin lines but once again they were out, and even their cell phones would not receive service. Luckily there was no fire, only smoke created in an attempt to thaw water lines.
Ridgeview News contacted OES Director Julie Sears to ask when the outage began, but was informed that she wasn’t sure. It had been an ongoing issue for over a week with the lines occasionaly working and then they’ll receive a report that calls won’t go through.
She had contacted Frontier Communication via phone and email and they cannot get an estimated time of repair. They tell her that the lines have “known outages” in the Grantsville, Mt. Zion and Millstone areas. Ms. Sears advises residents to check on neighbors and especially the elderly.
Report of Frontier outages continues to be a concern with the multi million dollars in grant funding that the company recently received. A complaint filed by the Kanawha County Commission in July of 2022 stated that customers in the Laurel Fork and Ben’s Fork areas near Quick in Kanawha County had allegedly been without service for more than 30 days. Apparently Calhoun County is not the only one dissatisfied with Frontiers work.
Frontier Communications has raked 9.2 billion dollars worth of grants across eight states in 2022, as the operators look to boost their fiber expansion plans with government support. States for which funding was received were: California, Indiana, Illinois, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
While Frontier hopes to rebuild their credibility with the new projects since coming out of bankruptcy in 2021, most citizens would be hard-pressed to believe that reputation can be restored; especially with their current trend of failed service provision. Republican Senator Shelly Moore Capito sent a letter to the Federal Communications Chairman, Amit Pai, in December of 2020, and in it she outlined that Frontier had mismanaged previous government funding at that point in time. So now we are expected to believe that Frontier Communications has turned over a new leaf and are now capable of handling another multimillion dollar project. In the meantime our citizens are placed at risk because of Frontier’s failure to repair and maintain services that were promised.
It serves to remind me of that old saying “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.”
Ridgeview had posted this story earlier stating that Calhoun was included within that grant funding for broad band from Frontier network. But looking back on previous data I found no mention of Frontier, but rather Citynet having the bulk of Calhoun’s broadband work. I’ll look further into it today to determine if Frontier carries a portion of Calhoun. Regardless, West Virginia has likely played the fool allowing them any part of these expansive projects with the expectation that they’ll be done in a timely manner or maintained once completed.
