CALGARY – A number of critical city services have been affected by a fire at Shaw Media’s Calgary headquarters.
The downtown building had to be evacuated Wednesday afternoon after a transformer blew up at the top of the building. Fire crews are still trying to determine what happened, but EMS confirmed that nobody was injured.
The blaze knocked out infrastructure powering things like city communications, fire department alerts and registries, as well as Calgary’s 311 service (residents are asked to call 403-695-3255 instead if they need to). 30,000 landlines also lost service in the downtown core, meaning they could not access 911 service. This caused an Alberta Emergency Alert to be issued and the city’s municipal emergency plan to be put into place.
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Government ministries have also been affected – no longer able to do things like court checks. The outage has even prevented people from buying fishing licenses.
ATB Financial’s online banking system was hit as well, as its system is housed by Shaw.
But the biggest concern is the impact to Alberta Health Services – the entire network went down. Officials maintain that patient care was not being affected, though.
“Right now they say it’s having no impact on patient care but it will once they start scheduling surgeries in the morning,” said Bruce Burrell, director of the Calgary Emergency Management Agency.
“It just shows the amount of reliance we all place on technology,” he added.
According to Shaw, the building was built and designed with double redundancy of systems. However, whatever went on in the electrical room compromised the system.
Despite it taking technicians awhile to get into the building in order to assess what needed to be fixed, Shaw tells Global News they expect power to be restored to their downtown building by 11 p.m. on Wednesday.
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