Fiber cable cut knocks out 911 call service in Amador County; 3 suspects arrested
AMADOR COUNTY – The sheriff's office in a rural California county says they've been dealing with a series of AT&T fiber cable cuts that have caused outages to the 911 system.
According to the Amador County Sheriff's Office, the most recent fiber cable cut happened Sunday around 9:25 a.m. Deputies say cables were cut in the same place as the last time this happened, near the intersection of Highways 88 and 123 in Ione.
Dispatchers were cut off from most of the 911 calls that were made in Amador County due to the fiber cut, the sheriff's office says.
Calls from dispatch out to other agencies were also not possible due to the service outage.
The Calaveras County Sheriff's Office dispatch center had to field Amador's 911 and non-emergency calls. The information was then emailed to Amador County dispatchers.
Amador County authorities were eventually given two phones by Verizon Wireless that could connect to Wi-Fi so dispatchers could make calls out of the center, the sheriff's office says.
The cut didn't get fixed until around 5:45 p.m. Sunday.
Amador County authorities later detailed how they arrested three suspects on Sunday in connection to the fiber cable cut. Deputies say they located a suspicious car in the same area of the fiber cable cut; they soon got word that three suspects had run into the woods.
Inside the vehicle, deputies discovered a pole saw and "copious" amounts of stripped copper wire. Also, a freshly cut length of service wire was also found near the vehicle.
Eventually, all three suspects were taken into custody. The suspects have been identified by the Amador County Sheriff's Office as Elpidio Rivera, Joel Riveravilla, and Hialario Lopez, all residents of Stockton.
It's unclear if those same suspects are responsible for the other fiber cable cuts in recent weeks.