Rincon subdivision frustrated over severed water lines

RINCON, Ga. (WTOC) - Residents of a Rincon subdivision claim their water lines have been cut multiple times in the last month during installation work by local internet provider Kinetic by Windstream.

The company says the project is part of an 18-state expansion to provide multi-Gigabit fiber internet. But in the Goshen Hills neighborhood, residents say the construction has brought repeated water outages, damage to yards, and even safety hazards.

RJ Heredia has lived in the neighborhood since 2018 and says this is the first time he has ever had this many issues with any company’s installation.

“We have 3 outages and then last week we had 3 outages, it’s just gotten out of control,” said Heredia.

He and others living in the Goshen Hills claim that its has been almost daily that one of their utilities have been down.

“We have watched our residence and our friends in our community suffer as the trucks plow through now unfortunately once it gets to your street the first thing you’re thinking is oh man I’m out of water probably out of Internet, out of other utilities,” said Heredia.

Company Response

WTOC reached out to the company who had confirmed that recently a water line had been cut as a result of their work. They told us in a statement

“We are building fiber connections to about 250 homes in Goshen Hills Plantation, enabling multi-Gigabit-speed internet. Before starting construction, we are meticulous to understand and comply with all building codes, regulations and procedures for deploying fiber optic cables. That includes requesting local utilities locate and mark their underground lines so we would not cut them as we buried our fiber.

Unfortunately, despite our careful planning and best efforts, on occasion damage to other facilities still occurs. When incidents happen, we are quick to notify our local community partners of the damage and work to ensure repairs are made as swiftly as possible.

In Goshen Hills Plantation, damaged water lines were repaired on the same day they were cut. Our construction crews remained on site during repairs to assist utility workers and patch the streets.

We apologize for the inconvenience residents have experienced. We’re happy to report that all major construction for this project is complete; we still have some cleanup work to do and will need to bury fiber lines from our main line to individual homes in the coming weeks. We will notify residents when our multi-Gigabit internet service is available.

If homeowners have questions, they can email us at UnitiCanHelp@Uniti.com.”

Kinetic

Kinetic also told us that the construction was almost completed but still had some clean up to do.

Visible damage, ongoing frustration

As the WTOC team drove around, we witnessed damaged driveways near work sites, cords from other providers like Xfinity sticking out of the ground and uprooted, even broke or loose cable boxes.

Residents like Stephan McMahon and Greg Kerly say they feel as if the company is lacking consideration and care for what chaos they say the company has been causing.

“When I reach out to them, I get nowhere, when I talked to them face-to-face... I get nowhere,” said McMahon.

“It’s just been a mess,” said Kerly. “They tell us they don’t care when we talk to them.”

WTOC relayed the message that Kinetic’s work is just about done in the neighborhood. But residents fear that this won’t be the last time they hear about issues created by the company.

“This needs to maybe be a bit louder so that as this kind of work continues to other communities and to other neighborhoods these mistakes are not replicated,” said Heredia.

Kinetic maintains that it relies on utilities to mark underground lines before digging and works to repair damage as quickly as possible.