Internet outage cuts phone service at Redway health center, disrupts Southern Humboldt

When the internet went down in Southern Humboldt, Redwoods Rural Health Center in Redway lost phone service for hours, cutting off one of the area’s main points of medical access and raising immediate concerns for patients trying to reach care in Garberville and the surrounding hills.

The outage began around 9 p.m. the night before and was still affecting some Frontier customers by the time of the April 29 update. At Redwoods Rural, the disruption mattered far beyond one clinic line. The center’s main medical number is 707-923-2783, and it provides medical, behavioral health, acupuncture, perinatal, dental and transportation services from 101 West Coast Road in Redway.

That breadth of care makes communications especially important. Redwoods Rural says it offers appointments by phone or video for medical, behavioral health and nutrition services, and its video visits require an internet connection. In a region where patients already travel long distances, a phone outage can slow check-ins, interrupt prescription coordination and make it harder to reach clinicians in an urgent moment.

Southern Humboldt Community Healthcare District has described the area as extremely rural and isolated. Its 2024 community health needs assessment identified just two primary care clinics accepting new patients in Southern Humboldt, SoHum Health and Redwoods Rural. That limited access means even a temporary telecom failure can have an outsized impact on local health care, especially when there are few alternatives nearby.

The outage also underscored a larger infrastructure problem that has long shadowed Southern Humboldt. Frontier’s own support materials tell customers they can check for outages and receive SMS updates, but those tools did not prevent the immediate disruption at Redwoods Rural. In a 2020 application to the California Public Utilities Commission, Frontier sought $3,776,254 in state broadband funding to build middle-mile and last-mile fiber for 106 unserved households in the Garberville and Alderpoint area, a sign of how underserved the region has been.

The area’s connectivity problems are not new. A 2014 broadband case study found rural Humboldt and Del Norte counties still lacked reliable internet service even after fiber extensions. A 2024 Redheaded Blackbelt opinion piece quoted local residents warning that Frontier was endangering community members in Southern Humboldt. Taken together, those records point to a recurring vulnerability: in Southern Humboldt, a routine internet failure can quickly become a public health problem.