Dozens of Manitobans couldn't reach 911 operators during March Telus outage: CRTC report
Review of company records shows 177 calls for help went unanswered between March 22 and March 24
About five dozen Manitobans tried to reach emergency services during a Telus outage that stopped 911 calls from reaching a Brandon dispatch centre for a nearly 40-hour stretch this spring, the telecommunications company disclosed in a report to Canada's telecom regulator.
There were about 177 calls to 911 made by 59 individual callers that went unanswered between about 10 p.m. CT on March 22 and just after 1 p.m. CT on March 24, according to a report Telus sent to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) on June 16.
The company said the outage was caused by equipment failure at the Bell facility, where Telus's 911 system connects with Bell's 911 network.
Telus said it doesn't know why the equipment failed, but that facility had been experiencing technical issues since early March.
In its filing to the CRTC, Telus wouldn't disclose the exact technology that failed or how its network connects to Bell's, suggesting that information could be used by third parties to cause outages across Canada's 911 call system.
The Bell facility failure only lasted about four minutes, but it had a ripple effect that caused eight network circuits that delivered 911 traffic to a central emergency dispatch centre in Brandon.
There are two primary service access points — or emergency dispatch centres — in Manitoba: one in Brandon and one in Winnipeg.
The Brandon centre serves seven police agencies and nearly 200 fire departments, including Brandon itself and many rural areas across Manitoba, according to the City of Brandon.
Winnipeg's dispatch centre serves the city area and is staffed by municipal police service employees, according to Winnipeg police.
A Telus technician was paged to respond to the facility within minutes of the outage, but did not follow company protocols to alert Bell and Telus about the 911 circuit outage. The technician also failed to escalate the issue within the company, Telus said.
Telus said it has disciplined the employee, whose actions prolonged the outage.
During the nearly 40 hours that Telus users were unable to reach the dispatch centre, 55-year-old Dean Switzer died of a heart attack in Fisher Branch, a rural community in Manitoba's Interlake region.
On March 23, his family tried to call 911 more than 20 times.
The service was reconnected just hours later. Staff from the Brandon dispatch centre notified Telus's 911 team around 10 a.m. CT on March 24, according to the company.
Telus said it immediately worked with Bell to resolve the issue and dispatch started receiving calls again just over an hour later.
Outage prompts changes to network: Telus
Telus said it reviewed how its 911 calls are delivered across its networks, adding an alternate route to send emergency calls directly from Telus to Bell's network in case a similar failure happens again.
If that route fails, Telus said it will send calls to its operator services team, and a staff member will manually connect the call to the right dispatch centre.
"Telus confirms that with these backup processes in place, 911 calls will continue to complete even with an equipment outage of this kind," the company said in its report.