Phone Outages Blamed on Copper Theft

Copper thefts in neighboring counties have recently caused several phone outages for people in Harlan County. The areas of the county that report being affected are the Tri-Cities and Evarts. “Last week we had a long distance phone outage after someone stole fiber optic cable in Perry County,” said Chris Campbell, account executive at Windstream Communications. “We went out and restored it, only to have the thieves come back at night and steal cable from the same section again.” He estimates that 4,000 customers in Harlan County were affected by last week’s outage. Company officials confirm another outage the week before that, also caused by thefts in Perry County.