Telus experiences black out impacting emergency calls
Posted Sep 19, 2013 12:21 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It was a challenging morning Thursday for first responders.
At approximately midnight, some callers to 911 began encountering busy signals as they looked for emergency help and Telus was in the midst of a two hour, widespread cellular and land line outages that impacted Alberta, British Columbia, and parts of Ontario.
Officials want to reassure the public, the system is once again operational.
After it was brought to the attention of first responders just after 12:00a.m. Thursday, they spent about four hours putting ‘Plan B’ in place which included anything from fire trucks patrolling random neighbourhoods to police using social media to dispatch calls.
Public Safety Communications Deputy Commander, Kate Choi, says the public was never in any danger.
“When we have a telephone outage or a compromising telephone system, we make sure that our partner agencies are front and centre. We notify them, we make that they’re visible and that they’re aware,” she says.
Choi says it was the phone lines that failed and they plan on working with Telus in their review to discuss a back-up system.
According to the city, there was no delay in response for those in need of help.
