Tayside Contracts has apologised for a digger accident which cut out phone lines in parts of highland Perthshire for more than 12 hours.
Nearly 3,000 homes were affected by Tuesday’s outage, which left residents and businesses unable to make 999 calls.
It later emerged that a person in Aberfeldy had died during the outage and their body was found at home on Wednesday morning.
However, despite initial concerns there is nothing to suggest that the person could have survived if the phone lines had been working.
Problems began at about 9.40am when a JCB ploughed through an underground cable between Aberfeldy and Pitlochry.
Iain Waddell, managing director of Tayside Contracts, said: “Our sincere condolences to the family and friends of the deceased at this time.
“We are aware that this death may have occurred during the outage to landline phones in Highland Perthshire.
“This outage was caused by damage which occurred during work being carried out by Tayside Contracts on behalf of Perth and Kinross Council, and while we are not aware of any link with this, we wish to sincerely apologise for any additional distress this may have caused the family of the deceased.”
He added: “We have policies and procedures in place to avoid the type of cable strike which led to the landline cable being damaged.
“At this stage it is too early to comment on what happened, however an investigation is already underway to establish the facts. Tayside Contracts would like to sincerely apologise to all residents of Highland Perthshire for the inconvenience caused by the damage to the telephone cable.”
Council chief executive Karen Reid added: “We are saddened to hear of the death of an individual in Aberfeldy and our thoughts are with their family and friends.”
Residents reported that mobile phone services were also affected.
Tayside Police issued advice to residents during the outage. They said that if people were unable to reach 999 operators via mobile or landline, they could try flagging down emergency service vehicles or visit local police station, hospital, fire service or ambulance depot.
