A brush fire Saturday was indirectly related to lost cable television service to residents in the Iola area.
The fire occurred late in the afternoon near Chanute, said Sarah Kauffman, a public affairs director for Cox Communications.
As firefighters battled the fire, water seeped into the top of an underground vault containing a fiber optic node and other equipment, Kauffman explained. The equipment floated to the top of the vault, where the searing temperatures from the fire caused the node to melt.
The outage lasted about 4½ hours until engineers could replace the damaged node. Cox customers in Iola and Humboldt were the only customers affected, Kauffman said.
“It’s the craziest thing,” Kauffman said. “I’d never heard of that happening before.”
