Month-long Frontier outage poses safety risk to disabled seniors

Thursday marks one month since record rainfall hit the valley on Valentine’s Day and some Frontier customers are still without their landlines.

Residents at Mountain View Apartments in Cathedral City say the outage poses a major safety threat because most people living there are elderly and disabled, left without a way to call for help in case of an emergency.

“We rely more and more on the phone,” said Shauna Watts, a resident at Mountain View Apartments. “And the landline can make the difference of minutes of getting that emergency help that you need.”

“If you have a heart attack and you grab the phone — you can’t,” Watts said. “It’s not going to work. How do you get help?”

Bob Rahl, the community’s assistant manager, has been working with Frontier to get service restored but damage is worse than initially thought.

“There were 3 major switching points, as I understand, that were under water and they had to pump out the water, dry out the lines and get new equipment, and that’s been an issue,” Rahl said. “They don’t know when it’s going to be fixed.”

The management had their office line rerouted to a flip cell phone as a temporary fix.

“It’s frustrating,” Rahl said. “We’re an office of four people that are using one cell phone.”

It’s a subsidized community with many of the residents living on social security or very low income.

“Getting old you become invisible,” Watts said. “You don’t count anymore. But being old and poor — you count even less. And this company is just reaffirming that we don’t matter to them. We don’t

A rep for Frontier said any customers experiencing service issues or interruptions should please call 1-800-921-8101 for residential customers or 1-800-921-8102 for business customers.

They said the recurring rainfall the valley has had has significantly delayed repairs, and the fix is not a simple one.

At the time of publishing, Frontier said the phone service for the community’s main office has been restored and technicians continue to restore service for other affected customers.

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