Editor's Note: As of early Thursday morning, the "Voice" is back on the air.
By Fred Stabbert III
MONTICELLO — A Verizon phone outage has quieted the airwaves of Sullivan County.
Both WVOS and WSUL radio have been silenced for days because of a problem with a Verizon phone line, according to Watermark Communications General Manager Helena Manzione.
“It’s awful, it’s awful,” Manzione said yesterday afternoon as she sat in her Bridgeville office with no phones, internet or ability to broadcast either radio station.
Manzione said Verizon workers are currently replacing a cable near Apollo Plaza on East Broadway, Monticello, which will hopefully remedy the situation.
WVOS, which can be found at 95.9 on the FM dial, is nicknamed “The voice of Sullivan County,” but that voice was silenced on one of its most important days – Election Day.
WSUL, 98.3 on the dial, also fell silent earlier this week.
Manzione is hoping that the stations would be back on the air “by Thursday afternoon (yesterday) or hopefully in two more days, I don’t know,” she said.
She has made daily visits to the manhole where the Verizon workers are busily trying to repair service.
The problem started a week ago Friday when WVOS went down. It was out Friday night, Saturday night and back on Monday, she said.
This past Saturday at 1 p.m. WVOS went down “and is still down” according to Manzione.
Calls to a Verizon Customer repair number were met with, “We are not allowed to talk.”
Manzione said her other station, WSUL, went down earlier this week.
“We have no [internet] streaming, no stations, and now WSUL is off the air,” a shaken Manzione said.
What made the problem even worse is that WVOS and WSUL were both scheduled to participate in a national Emergency Alert System broadcast at 2 p.m. yesterday.
“Every television and radio station across America was supposed to broadcast the test at 2 p.m.,” she said. “It is so frustrating, I don’t know what to do.”
Manzione said other Verizon customers along Bridgeville Rd., including Robert Green Chevrolet and Holiday Mountain Fun Park and Ski Hill were affected by the outage.