Internet and cellular service throughout Athabasca went down for a period of nearly 12 hours on Nov. 7.
The outage lasted from approximately 10 a.m. to just after 9 p.m. and also affected areas around Athabasca, according to Douglas Self, communications manager for Telus. These areas included Calling Lake, Baptise Lake and Island Lake.
The lost service was a result of a third-party contractor damaging a fiber cable while doing work unrelated to Telus, Self said.
“There was significant damage to our fiber cable,” Self said. “We had people on site as soon as possible and discovered it was very deep as far as these things go. It was about 12 feet underground so we had to bring in some specialized equipment.”
The line was also close to utilities, Self said, which made it a more complicated repair job.
“There was a gas line that was very close so we had to take special precautions to make sure those were not impacted at all,” Self said.
The outage prevented homes and business from using internet and cellular service for much of the day. Debit machines were also impacted by the outage, requiring some businesses to take cash only.
The town council meeting on Nov. 7 was also impacted by the outage. Athabasca Mayor Colleen Powell said in the process of accepting administration reports that the internet outage had hampered council’s review.
“Given the no-good, bad day regarding internet, a lot of this has not been perused as well as it should have been,” Powell said during the meeting.
The third-party contractor who caused the damage leading to the internet outage could not be disclosed by Telus, Self said.
“That’s not something we would make public just because it’s not part of our partnership. It wasn’t anything to do with us in the first place until our cable was affected,” Self said.
He added that the company was appreciative of customer understanding of the situation.
“Always want to assure them we worked as clean and efficiently as possible to get those services back up and running,” he said.
