Community Corner

Contractor Chops Comcast Cable for 15,000 Mercer Island Customers

An unnamed contractor sliced through a fiber-optic cable on Tuesday, Aug. 20, cutting off cable and broadband internet for all Comcast subscribers on Mercer Island.

Comcast cable and internet services were knocked out on Mercer Island for several hours Tuesday and early Wednesday after a contractor sliced through a main communications fiber optic cable, cutting off over 15,000 customers.

The complaints began rolling in on Tuesday afternoon when, according to Comcast Vice President for Communications Steve Kipp, a construction crew digging for project near I-90 cut through the main fiber line for the entire Island. Reports from local Mercer Island residents to Mercer Island Patch state the service outage began sometime around 1 p.m. on Tuesday β€” though Kipp said he thought the cable was damaged around 5:30 p.m.

Kipp said service restoration work began almost immediately and was completely restored at 1:30 a.m. early Wednesday morning.

"This is one of the larger outages that we've had in years," Kipp said. "Normally we have an extremely reliable system. But stuff like this just happens sometimes."



Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

More from Mercer Island