ENMU phone system has outage

PORTALES — The phone was busy last week at Eastern New Mexico University, no matter who you dialed. But nobody was talking on any of the phones.

The campus phone system went out Tuesday, and wasn’t restored until late Friday after CenturyLink installed new lines for the campus.

Clark Elswick, the system chief information officer for ENMU, said crews worked on the assumption the phone system was knocked out due to the heavy rains that hit Portales on Tuesday. The crews, Elswick said, simply installed new phone lines instead of fixing the lines that were an estimated 34 years old.

The outage affected around 1,000 phone lines on campus, from the financial aid office to fax machines. The numbers mostly carry the 562 prefix.

In the interim, Elswick said, ENMU staffers used a combination of cell phone calls, text messaging, email and other online services to communicate with each other and the public. Numerous departments posted to social media indicating they can still be reached via email, as well.