TDS telephone and online communications throughout Cathey’s Valley, Hornitos, Bear Valley, Hunters Valley and part of Mount Bullion went down late Tuesday afternoon, and as of Wednesday morning, none of the services had been restored.

The outage means there is no 911 service other than by cell phone, or any internet or telephone service in any of those areas should residents require assistance from the Mariposa County Sheriff’s Office or Mariposa County Fire or other emergency service provider.

Ron Bradshaw, the TDS Reginal Marketing Manager in Texas, told the GAZETTE Wednesday morning that problem appears to rest with an AT&T fiber optic line, but that no timeline had been established to restore service.

The TDS field service manager for the area, Randy Bruness, operates out of Idaho and is responsible for four Western states. There is only one local service technician for the entire region, Heath Brower.

Bradshaw said that two AT&T crews were assigned to the incident Wednesday morning and that Brower had been working overnight trying to identify the problem. He said, “Right now is appears to be in a one mile section of fiber optic line between Hornitos and Merced, and that’s our connection to the outside world. Any telephone company in the country, sooner or later, must rely on relay service from AT&T. I know our area supervisor is rallying the troops to get service restored, but until we get some sort of cooperation from AT&T we can’t estimate when service may be returned since it isn’t a failure of TDS equipment.”

Sheriff Brian Muller said his department had increased deputy patrols in the area overnight, and will continue to have an higher than normal presence until service is restored.

District 3 Supervisor Janet Mankins-Bibby said she has been lobbying TDS to create a redundant emergency Service back-up through Sierra Telephone Company that would provide some sort of service to at least a portion of the residents should there be a significant and lengthly failure of the TDS system.