Equipment failure is to blame for a temporary 911 service disruption that affected B.C.’s Southern Interior for more than three hours last week.
E-Comm, the largest 911 dispatch service in B.C., has completed its investigation into the May 5 outage, first reported around 2:30 p.m. and resolve by approximately 6 p.m.
“The cause of the disruption was an equipment failure on a piece of core technology within the TELUS network that allows 9-1-1 callers to be routed to the E-Comm emergency communications centre for call-answer,” the dispatcher wrote in a Thursday email.
“TELUS has confirmed that this issue has been resolved and all system redundancy has been fully restored and tested.”
According to E-Comm, communities in the central and north Okanagan, Okanagan-Similkameen, Thompson-Nicola, Columbia-Shuswap, Squamish-Lillooet (North), Central Kootenay, East Kootenay and Kootenay-Boundary areas were impacted by the disruption.
During the equipment failure, it said arrangements were made with RCMP to have emergency calls answered via local police non-emergency lines. After a few hours, TELUS was able to restore 911 service on a back-up system.
TELUS returned the 911 service back to its primary system on May 10, E-Comm said.