The ongoing flood relief works in Qormi. Photo: Jason Borg

Some 3,500 Qormi residents had their phones disconnected when an underground cable was damaged during works on the national flood relief project earlier this week.

Most Go phones rang off at 9am on Wednesday after one of the company’s main wiring services was “sliced clean through” by a large excavation machine in Mill Street, Qormi.

The company was digging 11-metre deep foundation holes into a section of the Qormi Valley when the major cable pipe, buried 1.2 metres beneath the asphalt, was hit.

A spokesman for Go’s engineering department said the pipe contained 8,000 cables serving the majority of the company’s customers in Qormi.

He explained that as fibre optic technology was adopted recently, the internet service was not affected, but thousands of homes and businesses were left with no landline or ADSL connection.

Pharmaceutical company VJ Salomone was one of the businesses affected.

IT manager Norbert Falzon said that although the issue was resolved within a few hours, it had still caused the company a major inconvenience.

“Our representatives and sales people could not make remote orders and we couldn’t receive calls from clients or business associates. This sort of thing can really set you back,” he said.

Simon Borg, the owner of a business in central Qormi, said he had lost hundreds of euros due to the outage.

“It might not seem like a lot but to some of us it’s our daily bread and it’s not like I’m going to get compensated,” Mr Borg said.

A Go spokeswoman explained that even though the repair process was slow and lengthy, the engineers had returned service to the majority of its users by yesterday.

Go engineer Valentino Sciberras said the repair process cost the company roughly €40,000, mainly to replace all of the 200-metre long copper cables.