COLUMBIA, S.C. — Neighbors in the Earlewood Commons community of Columbia are unhappy about some recent construction they say they weren't made aware of.
"A guy had knocked on my door in the morning saying, hey, I just want to make sure I'm on your property, so I'm here to look at gas lines. Thought nothing of it," Earlewood resident MVS Chandrashekhar said.
MVS Chandrashekhar lives in Earlewood Commons, a neighborhood in north Columbia. At the beginning of last week, he had a visitor.
But he said that when he came home from work, there was a large pile of dirt on his plants that he wasn't too happy about.
Then later that night, "(I) try to flush the toilet, won't flush, so I'm going like what's going on. So I'm, for about 15 minutes I'm trying to fix the toilet and then I'm like wait a minute. It clicks, and I check all the water in the house and it's obviously off and then I piece it together," Chandrashekhar said.
Chandrashekhar explains he then called Columbia Water for help, and they did turn the water back on, but he tells News 19 he had no knowledge of the name of the company doing this work or what they were installing.
"None of us were notified of any of this stuff, that they were going to be coming through or anything like that," Chandrashekhar said.
From research and remembering the company name on the side of one of the work trucks, Chandrashekhar said he learned it was fiber optic cable.
News19 contacted the company, LUMOS, to learn more about its protocols.
"We started out by reaching out to the cities, then we made our announcement that we're coming and then we started working with the cities to secure the franchise agreement which just gives us the ability to access the cities' rights of way cause they have access to a lot of the streets in the different municipalities," said Derek Kelly, VP of market development at LUMOS.
Kelly said the company typically sends mailers and places signage at the work site.
The company shared photos of the signage but said they aren't specific to the Earlewood neighborhood.
Kelly says LUMOS is looking at more ways to communicate with neighbors, adding that the company takes responsibility to ensure everything looks as good as it did when they arrived.
"We'll also reach out to our construction leadership there in the community and make sure they go onto Lancaster Street and just see if there was any issues that haven't yet been resolved," Kelly said.
If you live in this Earlewood community and have any issues with your yard or property, you can contact LUMOS here. You can also directly email derek.kelly@lumosfiber.com or karen.hoch@lumosfiber.com.