It wasn’t much of a storm that hit Cicero on March 7, but the rain was heavy enough to knock out the phone service to Our Lady of Charity Elementary School.
The rain saturated the ground and shorted out the line. The dead line automatically tripped the fire alarm, which sent a fire engine screaming to the scene.
To avoid more false calls, the school turned off the fire alarms until AT&T could fix the phone lines the following day.
Had it been an isolated incident, the Rev. Mark Bartosic might have let it slide. But the phone line, or some part of it, has been shorting out after rainstorms for more than six years. Each time, AT&T has responded with a temporary fix.
“When the whole line goes down AT&T will do a major dig down to the breach and splice a new section of cable to the affected area,” Bartosic said. “This sometimes will leave us without phone service for two, three and sometimes up to four days.”
With April showers in full swing, Bartosic worried there would be repeated outages. The school already has been without phone service three times this year.
Upset with the lack of a permanent fix, Bartosic e-mailed What’s Your Problem? The lack of reliable phone service is a safety issue, he said.
“Really, with 200 kids in a school, you need a phone,” he said.
Mike Schultz, the school’s building supervisor and maintenance manager, said the school even had the archdiocese call AT&T, but it was unable to get anywhere.
“You get to the point where you just give up on it pretty much,” Schultz said. “You can’t even get a phone number of anyone (at AT&T) anymore.”
The Problem Partner, Kristin Samuelson, called AT&T spokeswoman Amy Grundman in late March. A few days later, on April 1, Grundman responded with an e-mail.
“During the course of work with Our Lady of Charity Elementary School, we have determined that a small section of cable may need to be permanently replaced,” Grundman said. “We are working with the city of Cicero to apply for and obtain the necessary permits to begin work as soon as possible.”
On Friday, a subcontractor drilled a small underground tunnel from the junction box in the parkway to the school, about 400 feet away. On Wednesday, an AT&T crew returned to lay new cables in the tunnel. A crew will return within days to splice the wires and hook up the new lines.
“This is fantastic,” Schultz said. “Six years I’ve been goofing with this.”
The new wires should fix the school’s phone problems once and for all, preventing future outages during storms.
“The most important thing, of course, is the fact that we have the fire alarm functioning,” Schultz said. “Now we won’t be bothering the Fire Department with false calls.”
