Residents of Snoqualmie Valley had to make do with books, conversation or the old standby, DVDs, when a storm felled a huge tree in Issaquah and knocked out cable television, the Internet, and some phone systems.

Steve Kipp, spokesman for Comcast, said that winds brought down a tree just before 4 p.m. Monday, Dec. 29, in the 700 block of Second Avenue in Issaquah. The fall caused a power line to arc across a strand of fiber-optic cables.

“It was a complete cut,” Kipp said. That line was “a main highway of our network,” serving the Sammamish plateau as well as the Snoqualmie Valley.

Thousands of customers were affected, although some area residents still had access to some services due to backup systems, Kipp said. Without that redundancy, “it would have impacted a greater number of people.”

“Our crews were there right away, ready to fix,” Kipp said. However, Comcast had to wait until Puget Sound Energy repairs were done to reconnect the fiber optic system, late in the evening.

Fall City resident Bill Blakely said his cable television went down around 4 p.m., followed by the Internet connection about four hours later.

After talking to neighbors and learning their connections were dead, too, Blakely called up Comcast to report a problem. At first, he said, the operator told him the problem had to be local to his own neighborhood.

“Oh, get real,” he said.

Blakely spent 48 minutes on the phone with the cable company, and before being hung up on while waiting to talk to a manager, got a $4 credit for his monthly bill. He popped in a DVD and went to bed.

Kipp said that running fiber optic lines aboveground remains commonplace for the region.

“Burying lines sounds simple, but it can cause its own issues,” he said.