MACHIAS – An entire Sunday without any Internet connections? Phone calls that can’t get through to Aunt Tillie in the next town?

That’s what many Washington County households endured Sunday after a logging crane swung around, taking down two telephone poles and wires in Columbia Falls.

The Regional Communications Center in the basement of the courthouse was busy throughout the day, handling emergency calls particularly from Eastport and Cutler.

Callers in both places could call within their municipalities, but not beyond. Emergency calls in Eastport were routed through the Pleasant Point dispatch center, which radioed to the RCC in Machias. In Cutler, 911 calls were sent to the operations center at the former Cutler naval base.

Elsewhere around the county, communications were simpler.

“As long as people making the call have a phone connection that works, their 911 call will be answered,” RCC dispatcher Philip Roberts said late Sunday afternoon. “We’re just not getting the automatic information up on our screens, so we are asking more questions.”

Fortunately, Sunday was a low-incident day for emergencies around the county. Two grass fires in Addison and Whitneyville were called in by cellular phones.

Cell phones kept families and friends connected, but no one was getting anywhere on the Internet. Callers could reach others within their own exchanges, such as 255 for Machias, but calling anywhere else – even a town or two over – was spotty at best.

For those who ventured into the marketplace, some automated teller machines were not functioning. Some convenience stores reported trouble making transactions using debit cards.

Beginning around 8 a.m., the phone wires came down along a stretch of U.S. Route 1 near the Pleasant River Transfer Station.

“Those loggers are going seven days a week now until the frost goes out,” said Mike Hinerman, the county’s emergency management director who was driving on Route 1 at the time and saw the cables down just after 8 a.m. “They are hustling before it gets too muddy.”

Hinerman said that aside from the house-to-house phone trouble, emergency services were not seriously affected by the downed cable. No one was injured in the mishap.

“The 911 system has a lot of backups and fail-safes,” he said. “Calls would have been transferred around the trunk lines.”