Telephones in Downtown Sarasota Ringing Again

All landline telephone service has been restored to businesses in downtown Sarasota. Verizon crews have been working since yesterdays strong thunderstorms caused the outage. 

While the outage was ignited by storm, there was existing damage to the protective conduit, said Verizon's media relations manager Bob Elek.

"[We are] not sure for how long, what caused it, etc, but when the manhole filled up with water, it eventually reach that area, seeped into the cable - and voila – outage," Elek said. 

Elek said that while he expects no more outages, the fix to the phone line is temporary.  

"We’ll be working throughout the weekend to properly correct the situation but it should be transparent to any affected customers since any cut-over that is done will be done in the middle of the night," Elek said.