Municipal Malfeasance Again - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

This broken telephone pole's location is at 125 Merrick Avenue  Merrick, NY 11566. It is October 24th at this writing. This pole has been broken since last June. It is directly across the street from The Roland Chatterton Elementary School. 

I called this broken pole issue in to Verizon originally on June 27th and thought that the repair would happen soon thereafter. It was quite some time again before I happened to walk down that way but when I did on September 18th, I was astonished to see that nothing had been taken care of.

After many calls both to Verizon and to The Town of Hempstead (this community) and getting nowhere at all, I filed a complaint today, October 24th, with the New York State Public Service Commission.

 

 

I wonder what's next. I hope it's nothing like "Truck Knocks Down Pole, Wires Fall on Man in Merrick" at

http://merrick.patch.com/groups/breaking-news/p/truck-knocks-down-pole-wires-fall-on-man-in-merrick

or something similar.

Comments

[Jim]

The phone company is a private enterprise (although somewhat regulated by the government). Therefore, the title of this blog "Municipal Malfeasance" isn't accurate.

Even though the phone company may actually own the pole, other entities may have equipment on it (electric, fire alarm, cable, street lighting, etc.) Contact the owner of the wires highest on the pole (it's probably LIPA) and they would intall a new pole and move their equipment in the interest of preventing an outage. However, the original pole would remain in place until the other utilities move their reqpective equipment. It then falls upon the last utility to relocate their equipment to actually remove the broken pole. If there is no electric equipment on the pole, we're stuck with the phone company.