Customers of Verizon left without phone and Internet service since the May 8 storm devastated Southern Illinois will be left without respite, as the company will not be offering any credits or discounts for this period of outages.

Company spokesman Lee Gierczynski said policy states customers will only receive prorated monthly bills in the event Verizon has control over the cause of the outages, which is not the case in natural disasters.

Customers will be billed for the full month's service, despite many of them being without it for nearly three weeks.

"All we ask for is their patience and understanding as our crews work under these circumstances," he said, adding he could not offer an estimated date for restoration completion. "This is going to be a gradual process."

Gierczynski said Verizon's restoration efforts have moved more slowly than those of electricity companies for multiple reasons. First, crews had to wait until electricity company workers and contractors had finished most of their work, as a way to avoid congestion and delays.

Second, telephone lines operate differently than electricity lines, he said. When an electricity line is restored, it can return power to hundreds, or even thousands, of customers at once. Telephone cables require additional splicing to individual lines.

"Within the phone cable, there could be hundreds of individual phone lines," Gierczynski said.

About 800 lines remained out of service Wednesday, but restoration efforts in the past week have been moving much faster than in the two weeks prior, he said. At the peak of the storm, Verizon had 1,600 lines out of service, and most of those had been restored in the past five days.

Fewer than 5 percent of Verizon's 100,000 customers in the storm-affected area actually lost service during the storm, as back-up generators and battery-operated equipment continued most of the company's operations, Gierczynski said.

adam.testa@thesouthern.com

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