Phone-line cut affects some stores at mall

Newport Beach police phone lines were working Thursday after nonemergency numbers went down in a Wednesday outage, but parts of Corona del Mar and the city’s east side will lack service through Saturday night, phone company officials said.

Crews were working around-the-clock to fix the problems one cable at a time, said AT&T;’s Orange County spokeswoman Courtney Boyer.

“We were able to repair quite a few lines, and Newport Beach police are all back up to speed,” Boyer said. “It still looks like it’ll be a few more days for the rest.”

The outage occurred Wednesday when a Cox Communications construction crew working on Macarthur Boulevard near Prairie Road on cut several underground cables, police said.

The Newport Beach Fire Department, though next door to the police station, was never affected, spokeswoman Jennifer Schulz said. The department contracts out its phone dispatch services to an out-of-area provider.

It is hard to say how many people are affected, Boyer said, because not all the lines attached to the cut cables were in service.

Fashion Island in Newport Beach was still waiting on repairs Thursday, when several store managers said they received a memo about lost phone service. Yet the outage there was spotty; a few stores had lost the use of all land lines and could not automatically send in credit card information, while others had one or all of their phone lines working.

Computers at the Apple Store had Internet service, and employees at vitamin and health store GNC had not even heard of the outage. Kids’ hair salon First Cuts was answering phones and taking reservations.

Yet Debbie Askew, owner of boutique Lola Rouge, was definitely aware of the problem, which hit the store and its children’s branch on opposite sides of the mall.

“It’s a mess for everybody,” she said. “We have no phone lines, and we have to call in credit cards for verification with a cellphone. The problem seems to be all over the place.”

Next door, at casual menswear store G-Star, manager Julio Martinez said it was barely an issue.

“Credit cards still work,” he said, shrugging. “We have three different phone lines, and just the voice is down. It’s not really a problem.”

Shoppers seemed blissfully unbothered.

Jane Gillespie, an independent public relations consultant and a spokeswoman for Fashion Island, said Thursday that mall officials had not spoken of any problems to her, but that her parents, who live in the Eastbluff neighborhood, would likely not have their phone service restored until Feb. 12.