Wet weather disrupted telephone service to Cape Girardeau's Northfield neighborhood, leaving some residents without phone service for 24 hours.

The outage affected a few hundred homes, said Brian Westrich, a spokesman for Southwestern Bell in St. Louis.

The outage occurred around 5 p.m. Wednesday after water got into a spliced, underground cable. "It was a pretty good-sized cable," he said.

Recent rains have saturated the ground.

Service was restored gradually, beginning around midnight Wednesday, Westrich said.

All of the telephone service was expected to be back in operation by early Thursday evening.

Westrich said such lengthy disruptions of telephone service are rare. "In this case, it was truly an act of God type thing," he said.