$5,000 Reward Offered for Cable Vandal’s Arrest

Company Calls for Community Help as System Broken at Three Locations

In three nearly identical events of system tampering, all sequenced within an hour of each other, Rapid Communications cable and internet service to Pine Mountain, Pinon Pines, Lake of the Woods and Lebec was impaired last week.

System Manager Greg Banks reported Thursday, July 3 that "vandals struck our cable system again." He said the problem was first reported in Pine Mountain at 7:45 p.m.

"I located the problem by the mailboxes in Pinon Pines. Someone broke into one of our power supplies and stole a module and a battery. This outage affected our customers from Pinon Pines to Pine Mountain," Banks reported in an email to The Mountain Enterprise.

Banks said that twenty minutes after repairing that problem, calls began coming in from Lake of the Woods, where he found another vandalized power supply.

"Thirty minutes later I started getting calls from Lebec…Guess what? Another power supply was removed from a pole, causing all of Lebec to be out of service."

Banks said the outage was resolved in 30 minutes.

"We had three major outages in less than four hours that affected all of our cable and internet customers. I am asking for the community’s help to stop this ongoing vandalism. Please, if anyone sees anybody attempting to modify, move, or damage any of Rapid Communications’ equipment, please contact the sheriffs department."

Rapid Communications is offering a reward of $5,000 for information leading to an arrest.

"We are continually working toward providing quality service for our customers, but some issues are out of our control."

—Reported by Patric Hedlund

This is part of the July 11, 2008 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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