Bell Canada didn't tell OPP about 911 problems

Both SooToday.com News and Sault Ste. Marie's Central Ambulance Communications Centre have asked for face-to-face meetings with Bell Canada officials to discuss a critical failure of 911 service today across the Algoma District.

Sometime either late this morning or early this afternoon, the phone company says a fibre-optic cable serving the City of Sault Ste. Marie was sliced by a third-party construction crew.

As a result, 911 service was cut to most of the district, and similar widespread disruptions to cellular communications were reported.

Other phone services including 1-800 calls, bank machines and debit- and credit-card lines were also affected.

911 service had been restored to most communities by 7 p.m. tonight, but Rick Thorold, manager of the local central ambulance communications centre asked to meet with Bell Canada officials to discuss an apparent lack of redundancies in the 911 system to provide alternative communications channels once the cable was cut.

Bell released bad information, wouldn't correct it

SooToday.com is concerned about the phone company's failure to acknowledge that communities outside the City of Sault Ste. Marie had been affected by the disruption in 911 service.

"Service disruption is isolated within the City," Bell spokesman Paolo Pasquini told SooToday.com in a statement e-mailed at 2:23 p.m.

Fifteen minutes later, SooToday.com replied to Pasquini, advising that he was mistaken and requesting a revised statement, but Bell never acknowledged or corrected the error.

One ringy dingy: our one-sided conversation with Ma Bell

Law enforcement and social-service officials were concerned to hear a Bell spokesman proclaiming on the radio this afternoon that services had been restored when they knew that was not the case.

And local newsrooms weren't the only ones kept in the dark today.

OPP not told of problems in rural areas

"[We] never did receive any calls from Bell," says Staff Sgt. Wes Moore, commanding officer at the OPP's Sault Ste. Marie detachment.

"Unfortunately we were initially informed of a problem with long distance out of the city at 12:30 and had no idea the problem extended to the rural areas as well," Moore told us tonight in an e-mail.

"When we found out we initiated our current plan," he said.

That plan involved pre-positioning of police cruisers north and east of the Sault to respond to emergencies, with other cars stationed at the Echo Bay Fire Hall and Timberland General Store to forward requests for police service to the OPP communications center.

At time of writing, the exact time that the OPP learned of the 911 problems wasn't known, but details of the police response weren't released to the media until 4:10 p.m.

Retired OPP officer asked to hand-deliver the news

It's also not known exactly how the OPP finally got the news, since its own phones were not operational.

Between 1:57 p.m. and 3:13 p.m., SooToday.com sent at least eight "emergency" e-mails to OPP personnel asking them to address the 911 issue in outlying parts of Algoma District.

Around the same time, it's known that the ambulance communications centre had contacted a retired OPP officer who agreed to drive to the Sault detachment with the news.

The Sault Ste. Marie Police Service is reported to have made similar arrangements to have details of the disruption hand-delivered to the detachment on Great Northern Road.

In the meantime, Bell Canada was distributing incorrect information to the public and failed to act when advised of its error, said SooToday.com news director David Helwig.

'Algoma's emergency-response system definitely failed today' "Newsrooms provide a critical public service during civic emergencies," Helwig said. "In this case, there were communities where 911 was the only published number and people had no idea who to call if something happened."

"A 911 failure can be a life-or-death situation during a fire, medical crisis or serious crime, yet the phone company wouldn't acknowledge any problems outside the Sault. When township officials start contacting journalists asking for advice on what to do, it's a safe bet that the system is broken. We believe that Algoma's emergency-response system definitely failed today and everyone involved needs to meet to ensure it doesn't happen again," Helwig said.

As of 9:30 p.m., Terri McMillan, liaison officer at the Sault Ste. Marie Central Ambulance Communications Centre, said she hadn't been advised of any cases of serious injury or death related to today's 911 disruption.