24/7 emergency line fails during water outage

Updated Monday, June 23, with link to news briefs. Also, Linglestown Gazette publisher Bill Bostic has filed a complaint with the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission's Bureau of Consumer Services about the water company's emergency phone number ringing busy during the outage.

As you probably know, there was a major water outage in the greater Linglestown area today due to a water main break along Linglestown Road in Susquehanna Township. Gazette headquarters went dry sometime in the 7 am hour.

Dozens of attempts to get through to someone at United Water Pennsylvania's so-called emergency telephone number were unsuccessful – I got a busy signal every time. I finally heard a report on WHP 580 AM early in the 9 am hour about the outage.

With the advanced telecommunications technology available today, I’m disturbed that the water company doesn’t have a system to properly handle customer calls during a widespread outage. They should at least have a system in place to give an automated message when call volumes go through the roof that would say something like this:

We’re aware of the disruption of service that is affecting customers along Linglestown Road in Lower Paxton and Susquehanna townships. We are working to restore service as soon as possible. Work to fix the problem is under way. We will update local radio and TV stations with updates.

I guess utility monopolies don’t think about this kind of common sense stuff.
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The Patriot-News published a news release on PennLive.com Sunday at 11:10 am. The lastest info that I've seen was posted by WHTM abc27 early Monday afternoon, June 23.