Business complicated by lack of phone, internet
11:11 p.m. Thursday, August 7, 2008
The Topeka Fire Department arrived at 21st and Seabrook around 2 a.m. Thursday to find that a van hit a gas meter.
The gas line ignited and the gas company was called out to try to turn the gas off.
Police say the van was stolen from a nearby business.
No one was in the van when the fire started.
But that fire had a big impact, knocking out Cox phone, TV and internet service for a big part of the day.
The accident caused one local business to work extra hard to stay up and running.
Cox cable crews were hard at work Thursday afternoon along Seabrook and 21st getting the lines fixed.
Inside one local business, there's a sigh of relief to hear the landline phone ring.
"So we've been working off a cell phone for half the day," said Meggin Mattal of American Family Insurance. "They let me know that there was a problem here in town so we just had one of the lines transferred to the agent's cell phone."
But that was a lot of phone traffic for one cell phone, and there was nothing they could do about the fax machine or internet being down.
"Oh my, we're a very busy office. We probably get, I would say, 50 to 100 calls a day.....To one cell phone. So they've spent the rest of the day playing catch up."
Cox officials tell me the outage affected about 10 percent of theirTtopeka customers. The lines were all restored shortly after 5:30 Thursdays evening.
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