WORKERS CUT POLICE STATION LINES

Business and emergency calls to the Cape Girardeau Police Department were interrupted temporarily Thursday morning after telephone lines were accidentally cut by construction workers.

Direct communication to the police department was unavailable for nearly two hours after construction workers installing sewer lines outside the police department cut an underground telephone cable. Police officials said the accident occurred just after 8 a.m.

"It just went 'boomph,' and they came walking in the door to tell us they cut the line," said Lt. Dale Ratliff, who manages the police communications data department. "We've never had all the lines down at once. It's happened before, but that was mostly weather-related, and it was never all of the lines."

Dave Monier, project manager for Robinson Construction Co. of Perryville, said the accident occurred even though they followed preventive measures.

Utility companies request that they be called before any digging project begins to avoid hitting underground lines, he said. Such a call was made prior to work near the police department, and utility paint was used to mark underground gas, water and fiberoptic lines in the area. However, the telephone line was missed, he said.

"They generally come out and mark all the underground utilities with paint so that we know where they are," said Monier. "In this case, the phone line that was cut was not marked."

The accident could have had disastrous results. The communications hub for the city's emergency departments rests near the lobby of the police department. There, dispatchers work round the clock to handle the city's fires, crimes, accidents and alarms via 911 calls and citizens' reports. They monitor about 400 calls from 10 administrative and four 911 telephone trunks, some 100 lines in all.

Police spokesman Sgt. Carl Kinnison said no emergency calls were missed despite the system's downtime because calls to the 911 system were automatically rerouted to the county sheriff's department after the main system went down. Alerts also were sent to local media to inform the public to call the fire department with business or other calls.

Within 40 minutes of the accident, Southwestern Bell had provided officers with a cellular telephone for regular business calls, and telephone dispatchers manned radios and fire department telephones to dispatch officers.

All lines were repaired by 9:50 a.m., just under two hours after the accident occurred, said Kinnison.

"Even though it was down here, it never was actually down because out calls went to other systems," Kinnison said. "I doubt we missed any emergencies in the time it took to reroute the calls."