by EVAN MATTHEWS”
An almost all day outage last week was the result of a mistake made by a third party company not associated with Telus, the telecommunications company says.
The company, which was not named, accidentally cut through some of Telus’ fiber-optic wire around 8 AM on Wednesday.
“Our crews were on it right away,” says Richard Gilhooley, a Telus media contact, noting it was quite a difficult issue to remedy for a very experienced crew.
“The process was quite onerous,” he says. “It involved excavation, and splicing, things like that.”
Services started to get restored around 4 PM, according to Gilhooley, with the latest service restorations coming around 1 AM, but the vast majority came back between 4-7 PM.
“The services affected in the Robson Valley would have been wireless services,” says Gilhooley.
Though service was interrupted for the majority of the day, Telus says it’s a one-time deal, and not to expect many more interruptions.
The company takes steps to mitigate instances such as these, it says, but unfortunately mistakes do happen. “We really appreciate people’s patience and understanding,” says Gilhooley, who added Telus sent out a PSA to keep communities in the loop.
“We know it’s frustrating,” he says.
Steps taken to mitigate service interruptions, Gilhooley says, include signaling where Telus has lines and back up batteries in case of other failures.
Service was interrupted from Prince George, through the Robson Valley, with reports stretching as far as Blue River and Clearwater.
