The phone lines at the East LA Sheriff’s Station are back up after more than two months of outages caused by copper wire theft.
The update comes just one week after Boyle Heights Beat reported on the issue, and residents raised concerns at a Maravilla Community Advisory Committee (MCAC) meeting on April 7 about difficulty reaching the station by phone for non-emergencies.
According to the East LA Sheriff’s Station, service was restored on Thursday, April 23. By Friday, all dispatchers were back working in the station after temporarily operating out of an off-site communications trailer connected via satellite.
“This was made possible due to the concerted efforts of the East Los Angeles Sheriff Station Captains Hinchman and Kusayanagi, AT&T, and our Communications & Fleet Management Bureau,” the station said in a statement to the Beat.
The station also thanked Assemblymember Jessica Caloza’s office and community stakeholders who contacted AT&T to express urgency.
Sheriff’s officials previously said they had called Caloza’s office to help speed up repairs by communicating with AT&T.
According to Sgt. Michael Mileski, the outage was caused by an incident on Feb. 13, where several thousand dollars’ worth of copper wiring was stolen from an electrical vault near the station. Fiber optic cables were damaged in the process, which affected a significant portion of the Eastern Avenue corridor in Boyle Heights and East LA, disrupting phone lines for 100,000 residents for five days, Mileski said.
AT&T said in a statement that copper cable outages generally take five times longer to repair on average than fiber outages.
Copper wire theft has plagued the Eastside in recent years, leaving communities in the dark and disabling public facilities.
LA Documenter Alex Medina contributed reporting for this story. LA Documenters trains and pays LA residents to take notes at local government meetings around Los Angeles. You can find meeting notes and audio at losangeles.documenters.org
