I received another reply from an Arizona ARES official, copied verbatim below:
Hi Jay,
I am Bud Semon, N7CW, the DEC for Yavapai Co., which is just north of Maricopa Co. where Phoenix is located. The cut to the fiber optic cable occurred not too far from the border of the 2 counties and our county was impacted, along with some counties further north.
This incident was not really a communications emergency. The local monopoly Internet provider, Cableone, did lose their Internet access. The smaller cell providers lost service - Verizon was not impacted. The local landline phone provider lost some long distance service. Personally, I have Verizon service and an app on my phone that allows me to use cellular data for my computer, so I lost Internet for 5 minutes or so. Unfortunately, many local businesses did not have an equivalent backup, nor did the local 911 service. We received reverse-911 calls notifying us of the 911 outage - in fact we received 2 calls on our landline (local service was still working), 2 on my wife's cell phone, 2 on my cellphone and an email. Of course, all the folks with VOIP phones didn't receive those calls until service was restored, which occurred 3 or 4 hours later. To my knowledge, there was no effect on radio communications for law enforcement, fire, EMS, etc. The local hospitals lost Internet service but maintained their Intranet between their campuses. We were not activated by the county OEM or by any other agency.
Initially, there was a significant amount of incorrect information about the cut cable, from the media. As you might expect, I received a number of phone calls from local members, asking why we weren't in an emergency, particularly from those without a reasonable backup plan for phone and Internet. We did not activate a net, because I felt there was no reason - there was no one asking for backup communications. I did take advantage of the outage to test our local VHF Winlink Gateways - they should have been configured to accept and hold emails until the Internet was restored - they were not. That was my fault - I missed a setup parameter, which is now fixed.
I also took advantage of this situation as a teaching moment for our members. The usual stuff - were your personally prepared? Do you have backups for what you consider important functions? Have you registered for the reverse-911 system? Did you test your ability to reach the Internet beyond the affected area (e.g. HF Winmor)? And, most importantly - we do not self-deploy.
I have copied Joe, W7LUX, on this email. He is the ARES guru for Coconino Co. - our northern neighbor. Maybe he has something to add.
I hope that helps. Let me know if you have any questions.
73, Bud N7CW Yavapai County ARES/RACES DEC/Radio Officer
-- Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - jay@impulse.net Impulse Internet Service - http://www.impulse.net/ Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV