Some areas of service could take 3-4 days to restore

TIPPECANOE COUNTY, Ind. (WLFI) - UPDATE: Frontier Communications tells News 18 it will take three to four days to completely fix the outage.

Crews have located the cuts in both the fiber cables and the pairs of copper cables. A Frontier spokesman tells us they expect to have everything west of Yeager Road and all cell service back up late Friday evening.

But, many areas may have to wait days for a return of service.

A construction accident caused a major communications outage in Tippecanoe County Friday.

Many residents may notice their landlines and cell phones are not working.

“It’s a mess,” Frontier Communications General Manager Dave Sorg said. “The lines will be out for a while.”

Sorg says around 9 Friday morning, construction crews were working on the new roundabout at Yeager Road and Cumberland Avenue in West Lafayette when they accidentally pulled roughly 200 feet of fiber out of the ground. The process made cuts to fiber cables in that area, causing a massive landline and Internet outage.

Sorg said there were also roughly 1,600 cuts made to copper cables, which will take a long time to repair, perhaps three or four days.

“The (landline) area impacted, generally speaking, is all north of U.S. 52 and west of State Road 43,” Sorg said. “(The outage) may even go south of 52 in West Lafayette because of this.”

Sorg added that many AT&T cell towers in West Lafayette and up north near Interstate 65 are also down. Again, those are expected to be back up by late Friday evening.

Sorg says any numbers in the 463, 464 or 497 exchanges still do not have service as of 5 p.m. Friday, but Frontier crews have a new fiber pulled in and are working as fast as possible to restore service.

He also said there are a couple isolated pockets of Greater Lafayette that will see service return later Friday night.

Stick with News 18 at 5, 6 and 11 p.m. for the story, and if you still have Internet access, stay with WLFI.com for updates on the outage.