COLUMBIA --- A fire cut power and disabled phone lines for seven hours Sunday to the South Carolina Employment Security Commission, potentially creating delays for thousands of jobless residents seeking benefits.
A fire burned a pole adjacent to the agency's administrative building about 6 a.m. The building had backup power for about four more hours until that supply was exhausted, said commission spokesman Clark Newsom.
Work crews restored power around 1:30 p.m., and the commission's system was back on line about an hour later. Officials say the approximately seven-hour power outage will create a backlog for the upcoming week.
Allen Larsen, the deputy executive director of the commission's unemployment insurance program, said that since Congress passed an extension of unemployment benefits, his office has been gearing up for people to call in.
He said about 27,000 people had been notified of the extension and "all this is going to do today is back everything up."
"We're going to be asking people to be patient, call in later this week," Mr. Larsen said.
The TelClaim phone system was interrupted for those people scheduled to call in on Sunday using a new system designed to alleviate a possible overload of calls anticipated with the recent expansion of benefits.
Beginning on Sunday, all claimants with Social Security numbers ending in 1, 3, 5, 7 or 9 can call TelClaim on Mondays, the commission said in a statement released Sunday.
Though the number of jobless is in the thousands, Mr. Larsen said his office could get as many as a million calls because people will redial if they don't get through the first time.
Most people call on Sunday because it's the first day they can file, he said.
People who called prior to the outage will not have to call again because their information was captured before the power was lost, Mr. Larsen said.
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