CenturyLink denies inferior service

The director of a south Phoenix non-profit serving thousands of low-income families says CenturyLink left it without phone or Internet service for more than a week after recent storms and questioned whether the provider prioritized services to more affluent areas.

Mary Black, director of Black Family and Child Services, said CenturyLink effectively shut down the social service agency for eight days, leaving clients cut off from mental-health services, foster-care case workers and welfare-assistance programs.

"It certainly crossed my mind that, geographically, they don't value this neighborhood. ... They do not see South Mountain as a priority, otherwise they would have gotten to the problem within 48 hours," Black said. "To get service down here we had to call and call and beg and beg."

CenturyLink denied making Black Family Child Services and a nearby day-care center less of a priority or delaying service calls to poorer neighborhoods while responding to outages in other parts of the city.

But in a series of e-mail statements last week, CenturyLink spokesman Alex Juarez provided different explanations for the delay in service to the South Phoenix neighborhood.

He first wrote CenturyLink "prioritized available technicians based on the needs of fire departments, police departments, including 911, hospitals and municipalities." He later wrote that a flooded manhole prevented technicians from accessing a cable that had to be dried before it could be repaired.

"The underground wet cable, located in a manhole near Black Family Child Services and Lil' World Care, was worked on but it took several days to fully dry out. While our technicians' time was prioritized, we certainly did not deprioritize any customers in the south Phoenix area," he wrote.

After the Sept. 8 storm, which dropped record amounts of rain on Phoenix, CenturyLink's workload was seven times more than normal. Juarez said technicians were assigned to support emergency services and to monitor "the 911 network, which feeds police, fire and hospitals to ensure the network remained operational."

Juarex declined to provide specific examples of support to any city, county or state emergency department, police or fire department or hospital. He also would not provide details about the number of service technicians who responded to these emergencies and what areas might have been left unattended.

"In addition to public safety, we take into consideration the safety of our technicians," Juarez wrote in an e-mail. "This means in certain scenarios, such as the Black Family Child Services and Lil' World Care outages, repairs requiring underground access to cable are delayed until our technicians can safely avoid flooded manholes."

Black said she was surprised to hear about the flooded manhole. She said CenturyLink provided various explanations for its inability to restore service, with technicians telling her one thing and customer-service representatives telling her something else. She said no one mentioned a manhole..

"They are not consistent with their explanations," she said.

Black said when she first called CenturyLink to report the outage, representatives promised to send a crew right away. She said technicians arrived quickly, then told her they were being recalled because of widespread damage.

When technicians didn't return, Black said she called CenturyLink again. She said representatives told her that they had to respond to emergency cases. Black said she wanted to know why she wasn't considered an emergency case.

"I can understand not coming out in 24 hours. But they should have come out in 48 hours," she said. "We're still reaping the fallout from the calls we missed, the deadlines we missed."

Black Family and Child Services has been in south Phoenix for about 30 years. It offers services from mental-health counseling to adults and children to after-school programs. It also offers adoption services, foster care, substance-abuse treatment and runs a food pantry and clothes store for the needy.

Black said during the week without phone and Internet, the agency's 65 employees were unable to communicate with clients, some of whom needed immediate assistance for issues involving child placement and counseling issues. She said regular clients couldn't find out if the agency was open or not.

"We felt abandoned," Black said, adding that she and staff members called CenturyLink several times a day. "Every day it was a different story."

Black said at one point, CenturyLink representatives told her the problems had been fixed and they had canceled the service ticket. Black said when the service hadn't been restored by the weekend she became physically ill.

Finally, she threatened to call the media. Once that happened, she said service technicians arrived quickly.

"If we didn't start screaming, who's to say if we'd still be down?" Black said.

Juarez said in a phone interview he understands Black's frustration. He said the company serves customers the same whether they live in south Phoenix or Scottsdale.

"Every single customer is very valuable to us," he said.

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