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On Wednesday Premier Tim Houston criticized telecommunication operators for their response to post-tropical storm Fiona.
In a release from Houston’s office, he said, “Nova Scotians have questions about when their service will be restored, how widespread the outages are, and what the companies plan to do to ensure this never happens again,” Houston said in the news release.
“It is unacceptable that there are Nova Scotians who can’t call 911 or connect with loved ones during this difficult time. There is no question we need our telecommunications companies to step up and be more transparent.”
During a media briefing on Fiona relief efforts, Wednesday afternoon representatives from Bell and Eastlink explained their response to the storm.
Geoff Moore with Bell said he was confused seeing the reports from customers indicating they were experiencing widespread service disruptions as their system indicated things were mostly operational for the storm. “Ultimately this was a storm that’s impact was unprecedented so outages are to be expected,” Moore said.
Speaking on behalf of Eastlink was Lee Bragg who responded to specific criticism from the Premier regarding telecoms companies refusing to send representatives to the provincial Emergency Coordination Centre. “I don’t think the Premier’s comments were fair, we need to use our resources to determine the issues with our network, so sending one of the of the highly trained people to a facility is a matter of resource allocation,” said Bragg. He went on to explain that Eastlink remained in communication with provincial authorities throughout the storm.
As far as solutions Bragg offered a rather simple one, “We need to let Nova Scotia Power cut down more trees, our problems come from trees falling on lines, and the powers that be limit how easily they can do that, if we stop the trees 95 per cent of our problems go away,”.
Both the representatives from Eastlink and Bell said they learned valuable lessons from the storm and will continue to make efforts to improve their network reliability during storms.
