Telus advises of Feb. 8-9 service disruption

Photo: Fire Chief Fred Burrows discusses the upcoming Telus outage at City Hall on Monday – Christine Rumleskie/Energeticcity.ca

By Jon Zacks and Christine Rumleskie

Telus phones will be out of commission next Monday night, as the company completes some network upgrades.

Telus says both landline and cellular service will be interrupted for about six hours, in the communities of Fort St. John, Charlie Lake, and Cecil Lake. The service outage will affect Telus phone numbers with prefixes including 261, 262, 263, 264, 785, 787, and 794.

Discussion swirled around the outage at the Committee of the Whole Meeting at City Hall Monday afternoon. Director of Facilities and Protective Services Jim Rogers says the City needs to be prepared for the service outage.

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While the work is being done overnight to minimize the impact on customers, it means emergency 9-1-1 calls will be unavailable for the duration.

In a news release, Telus says local emergency operations personnel have been notified and are taking the appropriate measures.

Fort St. John Fire Chief Fred Burrows says that means emergency personel need to establish an emergency plan as soon as possible.

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The company is encouraging customers with alarm systems that are connected to their phone line to contact their service provider.

The outage is expected to last from roughly 11 pm on Monday the 8th, to 6 am on Tuesday the 9th.