A DOCTOR couldn’t get a vital message to a patient because of phone line problems in a rural area of north Cumbria.

The revelation comes as a second village reveals it has been cut off for more than two months.

Residents of Newtown, near Carlisle Airport, are furious that they’ve been left without a phone or broadband connection since the middle of December, after damage was caused to a cable during Storm Desmond.

While villagers appreciate the storm brought with it unprecedented damage, they are angry at the amount of time it has taken BT to try and fix the problem and with what they describe as poor communication from the firm.

The residents are the latest group to hit out at the phone line issues in the area, after The Cumberland News revealed last week that people in the neighbouring village of Irthington have been struggling for 11 weeks.

Initially between the two villages around 200 people were affected, with BT confirming that 113 customers were still having problems.

Folk in Newtown say their phone line and internet has at times been completely dead and other times it has been so crackly they are unable to make or receive a call.

They also claim that when they contact BT to find out what is going on, the date of when the area will be fully functioning again keeps getting pushed back.

The issues are causing a raft of problems for people who live in the village, including loss of business and making it difficult to keep in touch with relatives and friends.

But as Robert Armstrong, a retired pensions manager, explained, the consequences could have been far more serious for him.

“I had to go to the doctor last week and he said ‘So you’ve stopped taking those tablets?’ because they left me a message on an answer machine,” he explained. “[An answerphone] I don’t have at the moment.

“I don’t know where that message went. As it happened it didn’t matter, but it could’ve been a problem.”

Mr Armstrong says his gripe is not with BT for the amount of time they’ve taken to do the work, but he’s concerned about where his answerphone message ended up.

However, some other villagers aren’t as sympathetic towards the telecoms firm and are demanding quicker action and better communication.

Heidi Wright, who runs Wright Recruitment Accountancy Ltd from her home in the village, said residents have had enough.

“They say they are working through the night and the weekends but they aren’t,” she insisted. “We can see when they are working. But the major problem here is the communication for residents.

“We have a poor mobile signal here too and a lot of elderly people don’t have them and they aren’t going to get them for something they were told was a two-day problem. It’s such an inconvenience.”

The Cumberland News was also told how two teenagers in the village were having to travel to the homes of friends and family to do their homework and research, because a lot of the material they needed was online.

Jennifer Carruthers, 74, is on the village hall committee. She said: “There’s businesses in this village, bed and breakfasts, and I take bookings for the village hall and I don’t know how many of them we’ve lost.”

A BT spokeswoman confirmed the problems both villages were facing was because of the same fault.

“We have been doing lots of complicated engineering already and we have done some repairs.” the spokeswoman said. “But there’s further work that needs done to the duct under the road. But to do that we need some traffic management and we have to go through the local council to do that.

“We are doing all we can but we don’t have a specific timescale at the moment.”