LONG BEACH — A delivery truck snagged and severed a core fiber-optic cable at the Knappton Road/South Valley Road intersection in Naselle mid-morning Monday, cutting off south county Internet and cell phone customers whose service derives from broadband provided by Pacific County Public Utility District No. 2.

PUD acts as a wholesaler of Internet services to a variety of other firms that deal directly with consumers. CenturyLink, the other primary provider of digital connections in the county, was unaffected by the outage. PUD was the county’s original Internet service provider in the 1990s but eventually was barred by the Legislature from competing with private industry by offering retail direct-to-consumer service.

In an age where financial services, merchandise ordering and a variety of other functions are dependent on fast-as-possible Internet speeds, the outage in some ways resembled an old-fashioned electrical blackout. Businesses made do in whatever ways they could, for example by using cell phones as wi-fi hot spots.

However, for some this option — along with individuals’ ability to access cell service — was also impacted by the outage.

“We have fiber end points at a number of different cell towers for a few different cell providers,” Marc Wilson, PUD’s information technology manager, said late Tuesday afternoon. These cell providers that rely on local PUD services include AT&T, whose Pacific County customers were without service, except in some areas near the Columbia River, where a signal apparently was available from cell towers on the Oregon side. Verizon was the primary cell provider unaffected by the outage.

Since PUD doesn’t directly interact with end users of its digital fiber connections, Wilson said he is unable to estimate the total number of customers impacted.

“I can say that there were approximately 57 fiber endpoints affected. However, some of those endpoints can serve a number of end users. For example, cell towers. We could have a single fiber endpoint at a cell tower, but a wireless provider can serve a number of end users that we would not have knowledge of,” Wilson said.

The truck vs. cable accident occurred at around 10:30 a.m. Monday and the complex repair job took nearly 12 hours to complete, with about 85 percent of services restored at about 8:10 p.m. and the remaining “live fibers” mended by about 10 p.m., Wilson said. Crews continued after then to splice “dark fibers” that are not actively serving clients at this time.

“We were required to string up a new piece of fiber for three pole spans and splice the fibers together at each end of the new cable,” Wilson said. The new fiber was installed at a greater height.

Aside from the grabby delivery truck in this specific instance, he said the broader issue is a current inability to provide digital connections from a different direction when there is a break in the line.

“The linear aspect of the Long Beach connection has always been identified as a signification single point of failure,” Wilson said. “The long-term fiber builds include options to reduce and eventually eliminate large outages due to physical failures (fiber and/or electronics) by creating loops in the fiber system.” This would be the same as the PUD does with the electrical system, he said.