Fire knocks out Comcast service in at least East Deer, Springdale, New Kensington
The fire that quickly consumed a home in East Deer and damaged two others has also burned through Comcast lines in the area, affecting service that was not restored until after 10 p.m.
“This fire burned fiber of ours. We just got access to the site 15 minutes ago,” Comcast spokesman Bob Grove said at 5:15 p.m.
An East Deer couple and four children narrowly escaped a roaring, natural gas-fueled blaze that started Friday morning when a pickup crashed into a gas meter in front of their home.
Grove did not know how widespread the outage was.
The House of 1000 Beers in New Kensington posted on its Facebook page around 1:30 p.m. that it could not receive phone calls and was only accepting cash payments, and several other posts mention Comcast service being affected Friday in the New Kensington and Springdale areas.
“All we can do in these situations is have our crews assembled and ready to go, so that when the utilities get done with the things they have to do — and of course they have to go in there first to get service restored — we can go in and do what we need to do,” Grove said.
Comcast crews have been restoring customer service since around 6:45 p.m., Grove said, and service was fully restored around 10:05 p.m. on Friday night.
Patrick Varine is a TribLive reporter covering Delmont, Export and Murrysville. He is a Western Pennsylvania native and joined the Trib in 2010 after working as a reporter and editor with the former Dover Post Co. in Delaware. He can be reached at pvarine@triblive.com.
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