Woolwich officials are concerned about residents not having access to a new emergency alert system during power failures. One selectman, the town administrator and a handful of residents met with FairPoint representatives and Sagadahoc County Emergency Management Agency director Misty Mixon for a special meeting on August 7.

Dale Chadbourne, vice chairman on the Woolwich Board of Selectmen, told the phone company representatives that when the power goes out in the north end of town where he lives the phones do not work.

Woolwich officials want residents to have access to the 911 emergency alert system called “Code Red,” facilitated by the Sagadahoc County EMA. The alert system allows county EMA staff to send quick text messages and alerts to residents whose phone numbers are listed in their database, including those with cell phones.

“Our concern is if the phones go down how can we implement Code Red?” Woolwich administrator Lynette Eastman said.

Public relations employee Jeff Nevins and Bruce Ballantyne, field director of operations for FairPoint, agreed to meet with Woolwich staff to address their concerns. 

“This has been ongoing for a couple of years,” Mixon said to the representatives.

Ballantyne said they did a complete inspection of the phone company's remote terminals in town, in response to selectmen's concerns that the back-up batteries inside the terminal boxes that supply power to phone lines during an outage need to be replaced.

The back-up batteries are designed to supply power to the remote terminals up to eight hours, Ballantyne said, and the company is notified if any of the terminals lose power. The company has a number of generators that supply additional backup power to the terminals throughout the state. 

Ballantyne said the company receives outage reports, what employees call “remedy tickets,” on the terminals that lose power. He said these terminals should not be out much longer than the time it takes to install a generator at those locations.

Neither cell phones nor two-way radios work in the north end of town, Chadbourne said, and that cuts off people who rely on cell phones from the outside world there during a power failure.

“Those lights have been blinking for years,” he said, referring to red lights on pole-mounted terminal boxes he has found on the Middle Road, Nequasset Road and other locations. “I don't think those batteries are lasting six to eight hours.”

Other variables could be affecting phone service, aside from power outages, according to Nevins. Remote terminals are fed by fiber and copper lines, which are susceptible to other outside damage. Cables that are snapped, cut, ripped or stretched in any way could ultimately affect service. 

He and Ballantyne went to inspect the remote terminals in the areas town officials said people had reported a loss of phone service. 

“I don't understand what these red lights are,” Ballantyne said during a follow-up interview. He said the remote terminals do not have red lights.

He plans to meet with a local supervisor to identify all of the equipment and to make sure that the parties involved are speaking the same language.