Union Attacks AT&T Amid California Storm

winter storm hit and continued into the week. The California Public Utilities Commission is “in communication with AT&T and we are monitoring the situation,” a CPUC spokeswoman emailed Wednesday. The Nevada Public Utilities Commission hasn’t received any outage reports from AT&T for the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe in the past week, a Nevada PUC spokesman said. Communications Workers of America District 9 said in a Tuesday news release that service calls jumped 350 percent over the weekend and AT&T technicians have been working 14-hour days. AT&T technicians saw the worst outages in California areas of Redding, Napa, Clear Lake, Auburn, Placerville, Sacramento, Stockton and around Lake Tahoe, CWA said. The union's workers, who are in contract negotiations with AT&T and last month held demonstrations, claimed the outages could have been avoided if AT&T better maintained their infrastructure. “For years, we’ve been telling AT&T executives about widespread infrastructure problems and saying the company needs to invest in the basic landline services our customers need before it’s too late,” said CWA member Keith Mitchell, a maintenance splicer in San Diego County. “But AT&T chose to ignore us and the needs of our customers, and now the company is forcing us to work in dangerous conditions to clean up their avoidable mess.” An AT&T spokesman responded that the company invested more than $7.25 billion in its California wireless and wired networks over the past three years. “Ongoing extreme weather conditions and the heaviest rain in a decade have created an unusually high level of network repair work, which we are addressing by bringing in additional technicians from other parts of the country and through local technicians working overtime,” he said. “We’ll do everything we can to safely address the increased work load until the extreme weather passes and the situation returns to normal.”