
A 9-1-1 call dispatcher. (Photo via E-Comm)
The group which runs 9-1-1 services says an investigation is still underway as to what knocked out services through wide swaths of southern British Columbia last night.
E-Comm has confirmed callers from Lillooet to the East Kootenay were greeted with a busy-signal when they tried to dial 9-1-1 from around 2:30 to 7:30 p.m.
Jasmine Bradley with E-Comm tells NL News it forced people in-need to ask for help in the old way.
“We put out some information urging people to call the police non emergency lines if they needed urgent help from first responders so that police call takers could connect them with fire and EHS as required and they continued to process those calls,” Bradley said.
The problem was initially reported in the South Okanagan and the Central Okanagan before it spread to other regions of southern B.C., including the Thompson-Nicola, Columbia-Shuswap and Squamish-Lillooet Regional districts.
Bradley says it’s not clear how many calls were affected in each region.
“The 9-1-1 infrastructure in B.C. and quite frankly across Canada is aging and this is where the importance of public safety initiatives like next generation 9-1-1 where Canada’s infrastructure is moving to next generation technology based on an IP based system is critical,” she added.
E-Comm says further details about the cause of the outage will be provided in the coming days.