Published: August 21, 2008 09:35 pm      

Copper theft knocks out phone service in Greenup

About 1,000 affected

GREENUP — Copper thieves knocked out telephone service to about 1,000 Windstream customers in Greenup County Thursday morning.

Among those affected was Ashland radio station WLGC, which was off the air for about seven hours.

According to Windstream spokeswoman Erin Ascione, the thieves removed about 500 feet of phone cable from utility poles along U.S. 23 near Laurel Street. The theft occurred about 3 a.m., she said.

“They just climbed the poles and cut it down,” Ascione said.

She said the theft was particularly troubling to the phone company because it left a lot of people without a means of contacting help in the event of an emergency.

“When something like this happens in the middle of the night, it really puts our customers at risk,” she said.

Copper theft has been a huge problem for most utility companies for the past several years, and Windstream has been no exception. Such incidents in eastern Kentucky alone have cost the phone company about $600,000 over the past two years, Ascione said.

Windstream crews were able to restore service to all affected customers by 8:30 p.m. Thursday night, she said.

WLGC was affected by the outage because it uses a digital phone circuit to relay its signal from its studios on Winchester Avenue to its transmitter in Greenup County, Mark Justice, the station’s program director, said.

The station went off the air about 3 a.m., and Justice said he contacted the phone company. A short time later, he said, Windstream called him back and told him about the line theft.

Phone company workers were able to use a “jumper” to get the station back on the air about 10 a.m., Justice said.