No crisis during 45 minute outage
Dave Sullivan
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Mar 16/01) - Yellowknife's emergency dispatch centre was out of commission for 45 minutes on March 11.
A problem with the phone system at 4 p.m. meant people could not call in fires or medical emergencies.
People phoning heard ringing and ringing through earpieces but at the receiving end, dispatch centre workers didn't pick up because there was silence. Dispatch operators discovered the breakdown after being contacted by the RCMP over a radio.
Someone had called for an ambulance, but with no answer they got through to the RCMP, said Deputy Fire Chief Sandy McPhee, who added, in the end an ambulance wasn't needed.
After being tipped off by police about the outage, the dispatch centre started to execute a plan in place for that scenario.
"We ran portable radios to the RCMP dispatch, to the hospital and we had to put public service announcements on the radio stations," McPhee said.
Career firefighters, he added, were also placed on standby.
The phone system was fixed by the time the contingency plan was in place.
NorthwesTel's spokesperson Ann Grainger said the problem stemmed from a broken ring generator at NorthwesTel's Yellowknife central exchange headquarters.
"Not all customers were affected but one of them was the Yellowknife Fire Department," said Grainger.
"We had technicians there and they were onto it immediately."
The outage was just one of many technical glitches plaguing NorthwesTel repair crews this week. There were earlier problems with blown fuses and a high-speed Internet service run by a phone company subsidiary had some problems delivering service.
Also, for a short period of time Monday morning, many phone customers could not call long distance. Grainger said that one had nothing to do with NorthwesTel, but was caused by Telus in Alberta.
