Emergency Animal Clinic’s Phones Are Still Down After Last Week’s Storm

Customers are still without land line phone service in parts of north central Wisconsin following last week’s thunderstorms, causing serious problems for a local wildlife clinic.

Marge Gibson takes care of hundreds of injured birds at her Raptor Education Group wildlife clinic in Antigo. She takes emergency calls on a land line, because her rural location has no cell phone service. On August 16, all of her phones went dead. She says she was amazed at what she was told by a Frontier Communications representative.

“The attendant said, ‘We will be able to have someone about [August 28],’ which would have been about ten days,” says Gibson. “And I said that’s not acceptable.”

Gibson says she was then told that service could be restored in four days; service, in fact, came back within a few hours. Then last Friday, the clinic phone went out again following thunderstorms.

“Again, I went in and called Frontier,” says Gibson. “And this time they said that it would be September 9.” After complaining, Gibson got a promise for a September 6 service call – a full week after losing her phone.

She apparently isn’t alone. Frontier General Manager Frank Maydak wrote in an email to Wisconsin Public Radio that heavy rains and wind put the company “behind in our workload to restore service,” that the company strives “for a mean time to repair of 24 hours,” and that they are sending additional technicians to northern Wisconsin.

But for Gibson, a weeklong delay for service restoration at a wildlife clinic is unacceptable.

“People shouldn’t have to go without phone service for that period of time,” she says. “It has put us in a very difficult position. We respond on an emergency basis and people can’t reach us.”

As of this morning, the clinic at the Raptor Education Group still had no phone service.