A manager at Seapac Transportation Services LLC said the company lost millions of dollars because its phone lines were down for three weeks.
SEATTLE — Employees at SeaPac Transportation Services LLC arrived at work on June 12 to find the phone lines down. Three weeks later, service is still unavailable.
“We rely heavily on mobile phones to ship containers, export, import into the country, export out of the country. We are losing millions of dollars every day,” said George, the company’s operations manager, who asked KING5 not to reveal his surname to protect his privacy.
“Century Link sent someone to check our phone lines and we were informed that all of our phone lines, copper wires and fiber optic cable had been stolen,” he said. “They also told us that 900 businesses in the West Seattle area were affected, which is unbelievable. This is insane.”
After waiting a few weeks, George shared what was going on on Reddit. KING 5 reached out to CenturyLink about the situation. A spokesperson said on June 29, “We are currently investigating reports of an outage affecting customers in the West Seattle area. Our technicians are currently investigating the issue.”
CenturyLink did not respond to a request for an update as of the time of publication.
George said CenturyLink told his company that repairs to his phone lines were scheduled to be completed by July 10, a date he said was the third time he’d been given.
George said Seattle police told him they had arrested the person responsible for downing the phone lines. Seattle police did not respond to a request for more information.
Preventing copper theft
Despite restrictions on buying and selling the metal, a market for stolen metal still exists. A few months ago, KING 5 reported that EV drivers are facing issues with people disconnecting their chargers and stealing copper. A recent GeekWire article highlighted just how bad the problem has become.
Jonathan Howe, owner of West Seattle Recycling, said reputable businesses try hard to avoid buying stolen metal.
“We check ID, cash limits, customer identity, ask questions, verify theft reports, etc. We have a site called scraptheftalert.com that we check every day, and we’re on the lookout for flagrant theft,” he said. “We always ask where they got it from, and if we don’t get the right answer, we reject it.”
Howe encourages people to keep a record of all metal thefts by reporting them to the police and to scraptheftalert.com. If police ask for customer records to help solve a case, Howe provides them right away.
“I’ve been in this industry for 40 years and I’m nearing the end of my career and I don’t want to have a blemish on that career,” Howe said. “I want to leave a legacy of integrity.”
George said his company uses West Seattle Recycling frequently and can vouch for the strict measures the company takes to not purchase stolen metal.
