Burned cables down Verizon phones in Ridge

About 450 Verizon landline phone customers reported loss of service in the wake of a sparking wire Monday morning on a utility pole at Whiskey and Randall roads in Ridge, said a Verizon spokesman.

"Three of our cables were burned through, and will need to be replaced," said John Bonomo, director of media relations for Verizon.

More customers are likely to have been affected but have not reported loss of service, Bonomo said.

Repair crews have been on the scene, the spokesman said, and by 9:30 p.m., about 275 customers had working phones. He expected all lines to be back up by later this week.

At 7:53 a.m. Monday, the Long Island Power Authority responded to a sparking wire, caused by "a fault in the primary cable on the utility pole," said Mark Gross, LIPA spokesman. No LIPA customers were affected, he said.

Jim Maiella, a spokesman for Cablevision, which is Newsday's parent company, said that "service was disrupted for customers in a small area of Shoreham for part of the day Monday, the result of an electrical fire . . . that damaged a portion of our network. We worked quickly to make necessary repairs and service was fully restored by late afternoon."

Timothy Doran, 60, said he lost his Verizon phone service shortly after 9 a.m. Monday. A resident of Leisure Village, a gated condominium community in Ridge for those 55 and over, he said he's concerned for seniors in his and two other retirement communities in the area. A former computer engineer who has suffered multiple heart attacks, he said he uses a cellphone, but many seniors don't and rely on their landlines "as lifelines," he said.

Thomas Mielnicki, community manger at Leisure Village Association, said on Tuesday morning he added a line to the association's Sprint wireless account for use by the community's security personnel, whose Verizon line is out of commission. Residents were informed through the community's closed-circuit television system to call the new Sprint cell number if they have to reach security, he said.

With Ellen Yan