EDMONTON – Residents of Spruce Grove are fed up with their phone service, which has been cutting out since last summer. Telus says copper wire theft is to blame, but those in Rolling Meadows Estates believe there’s more to it than that.
Kim Kedra relies heavily on her phone and fax to operate her trucking business. But she often finds herself having to resort to other lines of communication.
“I’m just happy we have satellite internet…otherwise I’d be out of business,” she says.
Margaret Hampton is also tired of picking up her phone and not hearing a dial tone. She’s even more frustrated with how she says the situation has been handled over the past year.
“One young guy on the Friday told me you shouldn’t be worrying about your phone, it’s the weekend, go and have a nice weekend. I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ We’ve been nine days without a phone at that point and he’s telling me to go and have a nice weekend.”
Even though the telephone service is working now, Hampton isn’t so sure it will stay that way. She thinks the problem isn’t just copper wire theft, but construction in the area. One possible fix, she believes, would be to bury the wires.
“There’s cables lying on top of the ground, that the techs from Edmonton that came out told us that a construction company had been running back and forth over top of it with a CAT and had cut it over and over again. There was splicings all over the place. The wiring and cable is just old.”
A spokesperson from Telus says $12 million has been earmarked to bury cable lines in this area. But now it’s a race against time to get the cables buried before winter, in hopes that it’s the last summer that phone service is put on hold for Rolling Meadows Estates residents.
In the meantime, Telus continues to work with RCMP to try and curb copper wire theft in the area. A spokesperson for the company is also hopeful that new anti-metal theft legislation will be introduced by the provincial government to offer a more permanent solution to the problem.
With files from Jenna Bridges, Global News
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