Wednesday, March 26, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
A pair of unrelated cable television outages left 30,000 customers -- mostly Green Valley residents -- and thousands of guests at several major Strip hotels without service.
The incidents occurred Tuesday afternoon and evening and at first were believed to be related, a Prime Cable official said today.
Steve Schorr, spokesman for the valley's largest cable television company, said the first incident at Russell Road and Tamarus Street was caused by a construction firm's backhoe breaking recently laid high-tech fiber line. It affected 30,000 Green Valley customers and the hotels.
The second incident, he said, was caused by acts of vandalism at Windmill Road and Jessup Street and Windmill and Vince Lombardi Street, where cable vaults were breached and old-style coaxial cable lines were cut with a hacksaw. It affected about 300 Las Vegas customers.
Schorr said although the construction company called authorities before digging, it is the cable firm's position that the builder is liable for the damages because it used machinery to dig around the marked cable lines when the law allows only hand digging.
Cable was restored to the residential customers within two hours. It took an additional hour to restore service to the hotels, including the Excalibur, Luxor, MGM Grand and New York-New York, Schorr said.
Later, the cable company learned that 300 customers, believed to be part of the first outage, were not back on line. Schorr said it took 2 1/2 hours to find the vandalized units and about half an hour to restore service.
archive
