Fort St. John plucked from Monday's Telus outage

Friday, February 5, 2010

Photo: Telus will be conducting a scheduled maintenance to repair a broken fiber-optic cable in the North Peace. The outage will temporarily leave some residents without landline services. - Christine Rumleskie/Energeticcity.ca

By Christine Rumleskie

Telus is clearing up some controversy stemming from a service outage scheduled for Monday the 8th.

Earlier this week, Telus indicated that landline and cellular services would be temporarily shut down in Fort St. John, Charlie Lake and Cecil Lake. Now, spokesperson Jeremy Baxter says the company has found a way to exclude Fort St. John from the outage.

He says the company has also found a way to reroute cellular service, giving all affected residents access to their cell phones.

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So, the scheduled maintenance will interrupt only landline services in Cecil Lake, Flatrock, Goodlow and Boundary Lake. Cell phone service will be still available in all four communities.

The outage will begin after 11 p.m. on Monday, February 8 2010.

Fort St. John Mayor Bruce Lantz voiced his frustration in the matter. He said the city scrambled to put together an emergency strategy, only to be told that there will be no such outage.

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Emergency Strategy

Submitted by downtoearth on Sun, 2010/02/07 - 09:50.

Shouldn't the city have an emergency strategy in place in the event of any major outage or disruption in service that could be caused by massive equipment failures, or say earthquakes or other natural disasters? My question is: why wasn't something already in place? Every business that deals with the Oil & Gas Industry has to have an evacuation plan and safety strategy in place to meet the Enform safety regulations, don't you think that the municipalities should have something similar in place that is updated and evaluated on a regular basis? Mr. Lantz almost sounds disappointed that there won't be a wide-spread telephone outage, instead of being happy that a potential crisis was averted, and that Telus has worked out alternative options, and that the city were made aware of their shortcomings in this area - before something unexpected and disastrous happened!