NORWICH – City residents along a portion of South Broad and Hale streets awoke to a lack of telephone, cable and at least two traffic signal lights Saturday morning. Overhead wires lay strewn about the streets and sidewalks on the city’s south side, forcing road crews to close Hale Street for more than three hours.

Utility workers from Frontier Communications, NYSEG, and Time Warner Cable were called in to repair the downed lines and restore service to nearly 40 customers. A foreman from the New York State Department of Transportation was summoned to inspect two traffic lights that had been ripped from their cables as well.

At approximately 8 a.m., a City of Norwich Department of Public Works dump truck traveling along the route malfunctioned and its dump box became engaged. The city employee was unaware of the raised dump box and continued to the DPW garage on Hale Street.