Storm damaged AT&T phone lines in Southland may not be repaired until January

The winter storms that hammered the Southland did more than flood streets and trigger mudslides. The wet weather also knocked out phone service for scores of AT&T customers across the region, including parts of Riverside.

Thousands of Inland homes and business not only lost landline phone service, they lost Internet connections too.

AT&T says in some instances, the heavy rain fried circuits in outdoor and basement telephone cable boxes. That’s apparently what happened at KPCC’s Riverside bureau. Its phone service went dead Dec. 22. A telephone recording at AT&T’s support line promised a repair technician would arrive by the end of Monday. None did.

Other customers were told technicians wouldn’t be available before the end of next week. AT&T won’t estimate how long it might take to clear the backlog of repair calls. The phone company says it’s redeploying repair crews from Northern California to deal with the crush of outages.