P.M. BRIEFING : Sabotage Blamed in Phone Outage

BOSTON — For the second time in 24 hours, fiber-optic cables owned by the strike-plagued New England Telephone Co. were severed in what the company today called another “act of sabotage.”

Someone cut an aboveground cable in Biddeford, Me., at about midnight Thursday, affecting about 5,000 circuits and disrupting operator and repair services to customers across the state, the company said.

“It caused severely limited access to operator assistance and phone repair lines for callers throughout the state,” New England Telephone spokesman John Johnson said.

On Thursday, the company blamed vandals for cutting cables underneath a manhole in the southeastern Massachusetts community of Bridgewater about 2:30 a.m., disrupting long distance calls in 12 surrounding communities in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.