LIGHTNING LEAVES CAPE CABLE SYSTEM IN DARK EARLY THURSDAY

Lightning pulled the plug on cable television in much of Cape Girardeau early Thursday, and cable system officials were left in the dark about the situation for about five and a half hours.

Cable TV was off from about midnight Wednesday to around 7:30 a.m. Thursday, said Roger Harms, local manager of TCI Cablevision of Missouri Inc. The cable company serves about 13,000 subscribers in Cape Girardeau and Jackson.

Harms said lightning was to blame. "It took some amplifiers out on the way into town," said Harms.

The lightning blew fuses in the amplifiers and transformers. The headend tower site near Jackson, was not damaged, and cable service was not interrupted for Jackson customers, he said.

TCI has equipment in its Cape Girardeau office that allows after-hours calls to be switched automatically to a regional answering service in St. Louis.

Lightning, however, apparently caused a power outage at the cable TV office in Cape Girardeau, said Harms. As a result, customers who called about the outage could not get through to the answering service.

"And we didn't pick up any of the calls coming in, so we weren't aware of it (the outage) until about 5:30 this morning," Harms said Thursday. "We didn't know there was a major outage until that time."

Service was restored after "we replaced fuses and replaced different transformers and stuff like that," said Harms.

As to the service interruption, Harms said: "It's one of the flukes of nature. Lightning does things like that."