NORWALK, Iowa (WHO) — Wednesday marked day six since a water pipe burst at the Lumen building in downtown Des Moines, which caused massive outages for different public services, hospitals and customers across the state.
Lumen said that the majority of those outages related to the pipe burst have been resolved. It was only a small portion of customers that were left impacted with the outages still.
The company was not able to estimate the number of customers without phone or internet service, or when the issue would be resolved in it’s entirety. One customer in Norwalk has been without her services for six days now.
“The most frustrating is getting a representative that doesn’t realize that there’s even an outage when you give them your address and you spend an hour on the phone with them troubleshooting and get to the point where they decide that they are going to have to probably send the technician out, and I said well I was just told earlier that that I’m part of an outage, what’s that going to do to help,” said Tracey Lloyd, who lives in Norwalk.
Lloyd works from home but has had to be in the office the last several days. But some of her co-workers are not able to commute in so they haven’t been able to work.
“We can’t work from home and a lot of people do not have that option to go into the office, so they are not working. And we’ve explained that to them but they just don’t understand,” said Lloyd.
She has gotten a voucher from Lumen to cover the last several days for her. But she wants a better customer service experience, as right around 6 p.m. customer services representatives turn the duties over to the automated chats.
Lumen said that customers are being restored by the hour, and that the Des Moines market is so big that some outages may not be related to the pipe burst. The company encourages customers if they have issues to call the 1-800 number on the monthly invoices.