Little Village Community and LVEJO Win a Victory with Ameritech!
2 Blocks of Main Alley Telephone Cable Gets Replaced!

For more than three decades telephone repair people have been telling the residents of Little Village that our alley cables are the oldest in the city. In fact some repairmen have been coming to our community putting band-aids on old, cracked lead telephone cable all that time. On some blocks Ameritech/SBC techs have been in our alleys every week trying to fix the old cable that has unwound, exposing the old paper insulation that cover old phone wires

First working for Illinois Bell, then Ameritech and now SBC dozens of repairmen and supervisors have told us since the 1970's that the main cables in the alleys to which the phones in our homes, schools, health clinics and hospitals, churches, parks and businesses connect needed to be replaced by new cable.

Thousands of us have been without phone service when it rains; snows or the wind blows too hard. Our community elders who live alone, parents with babies and toddlers and the rest of us can't make emergency calls several times a year.

As more and more of us get a second phone line for Internet access, the situation has grown worse.

As soon as LVEJO moved into its new office 3 years ago we began having trouble with all of our phone lines. A total of 15 different Ameritech/SBC technicians came out to our office all telling us it was "an outside" problem with the alley cable. They all said they put in work orders for the alley cable to be replaced.

However, as had been true for the 30 years before, the phone company didn't want to "invest" in new cable and instead put "Band-Aid" splices on that never lasted.

Finally, in the summer of 2001 LVEJO took action. We went door to door on the 4 square blocks closest to our office only to discover that the majority of the over 200 households had the same problems we did.

We then wrote a letter to the president of SBC Illinois demanding the alley cable in 2 blocks be replaced and that we work together with our neighbors to identify all the hot spots in Little Village and a specific timetable to replace old alley cables with new ones.

On March 8th, 2002 the new alley cable work for the 2 blocks was completed. This Spring we will have a series of public meetings with SBC to identify the other alley cable that needs to be replaced and a month by month timetable.

The new phone cable campaign is part of our "equal access and fair treatment" campaign by Chicago's utilities: SBC, Com/Ed and People's energy.

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Environmental Research Foundation / Rachel's News Archive now housed with LVEJO (En Español)