A Bell MTS service outage has left more than 50 people without access to 911, according to a report to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
Bell filed the report regarding its April 28 outage with the CRTC on Wednesday, according to the Winnipeg Free Press. The company said that it was a power failure caused by issues with a generator cooling system and the depletion of backup batteries, as well as issues with surveillance tools that didn’t trigger alarms, which are to blame for the outage.
The company’s report indicated that this issue impacted voice, broadband, transport, and 911 services. Further, it indicated that 53 callers to 911 got a busy signal.
Bell said that its surveillance tools didn’t trigger alarms because they weren’t working at the time, and “incident diagnosis could have been faster if there were manual checks being done while alarming was compromised.”
The union that represents Bell MTS technicians in Manitoba wasn’t impressed by the situation.
These alarms would normally have been monitored here in Manitoba, but they’ve taken those jobs away from our folks and moved them elsewhere,” International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 435 business manager Richard Ferris said Wednesday, as reported by the Winnipeg Free Press. “When the generator didn’t kick in, there’s backup batteries that typically will last six or eight hours — maybe longer — that would give them enough time to dispatch the technician and at least start on the repair and hopefully prevent this outage,” Ferris said. “In this case, as far as I know, nobody got that alarm or saw it or was monitoring it. By the time anyone realized what was going on, it was too late.
Ferris called on the federal government to pass legislation that protects Manitobans, while also asking the Manitoba government to lobby Ottawa for protection from interrupted service. The province’s New Technology Minister, Mike Moroz, had more to say on this issue. “I’m deeply frustrated by Bell’s continued cavalier approach to this outage and to previous ones, as well,” Moroz said in an interview on Wednesday. “Frankly, accessing life-saving services through 911 isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity. And it’s unacceptable that these services were down at all.” Additionally, Moroz noted that Bell poorly communicated with the public about this outage.
Even a Winnipeg hospital’s phone service was affected by the outage. Bell MTS said Saturday that landline service had been restored for Grace Hospital and other Manitoba customers following a disruption that began early April 28.
A hospital down and 53 calls to 911 that didn’t go through could have been deadly for some. “Definitely, we got lucky,” said Ferris.
