Palm tree fire causes large outage for Cox customers

An east valley palm tree fire Monday evening caused a major outage for Cox Communications that cut service for an unknown number of residential and commercial customers.

The fire was reported near East Tropicana Avenue and South Sandhill Road about 6 p.m., said Stephanie Stallworth, Cox spokeswoman.

“The fire basically took down a lot of fiber and power that was running through the cable and power lines,” Stallworth said. “As soon as the fire was out, our crews started working in the wee hours of the morning and had to knit every piece of fiber back together.”

Repairs were being completed about noon Tuesday, and Stallworth said affected customers should have services restored by early afternoon after a test of the repairs.

The outage affected all services from Cox, including phone, cable and internet.

Stallworth said she did not know the number of affected customers, but said the fiber was a large piece and could affect Cox customers in all directions from the fire.

Contact Marvin Clemons at mclemons@reviewjournal.com. Follow @Marv_in_Vegas on Twitter.