(Spirit Lake)– A major fiber optics cable that was cut Monday knocked out most telephone, internet and cellular service to the Iowa Great Lakes.
911 service was also affected, but fortunately officials say no major emergencies took place during the outage.
Officials with Qwest say the outage happened shortly after 10:00 a.m. when a contractor working on the turning lane project in the area of Highway 71 and 202nd Street just south of Arnolds Park accidentally hit the cable.
It wasn’t until about 6:30 p.m. before service was finally restored.
Qwest says some seven thousand of its customers in the Iowa Great Lakes Area were affected by the outage.
