By Times Chronicle Staff
TELUS says its network remains stable after a huge swath of southern B.C. lost 911 service for over four hours yesterday (May 5).
Both TELUS as the infrastructure provider and Emergency Communications for British Columbia Incorporated (E-Comm) – the emergency communication services provider – are short on answers as to how this critical system went down.
“We are working closely with our partner E-Comm to investigate the root cause of yesterday’s disruption,” a TELUS spokesperson said. The telecommunications company said its crews “fully restored service shortly after 7 p.m.” yesterday evening. It did not elaborate on what actions its crews took to restore the service, however.
“We can confirm the network remains stable,” the spokesperson added.
E-Comm, the company responsible for providing 911 services said Friday the cause of the outage is currently under investigation, adding that TELUS technicians continued to work through the night. The company said further details will be provided in the coming days.
E-Comm said it was made aware of the 911 system disruption at approximately 2:30 p.m. yesterday. The service disruption impacted callers in the Regional Districts of the Central Okanagan, North Okanagan, Okanagan-Similkameen, Thompson-Nicola, Columbia-Shuswap, Squamish-Lillooet (North), Central Kootenay, East Kootenay and Kootenay-Boundary, according to E-Comm.
The company advised customers yesterday afternoon to call their local 10-digit police non-emergency line if they have an emergency for which immediate action is required: someone’s health, safety or property is in jeopardy or a crime is in progress.
Callers in need of urgent medical care or fire response were also advised to dial the police non-emergency number and relay this to the call taker.
