A prevalent phone and internet service outage in Atlantic Canada affected emergency services like fire, ambulances and the police’s communication with first responders on Friday.
Much of Atlantic Canada lost service for more than four hours after what Bell called "accidental damage" to its fibre optic grid.
Bell said its major service outage hit internet, TV, wireless and landline phones, with landline 911 service intermittent.
It wasn’t just Bell phone and internet services that went down, Halifax Regional Fire and Rescue and police lost connection with their trunk radio system.
"It appears we can go from portable radio to portable radio, but, anything where there was a tower involved, it's not working,” said Halifax Regional Deputy Fire Chief, Roy Hollett.
Emergency services quickly found ways to make the radio system work. Fire halls became radio and telephone communications hubs that reached out to other fire halls and emergency services.
Similarly, police used a portable radio to radio connection to contact one another.
Within the first hour of the outage, the Halifax Regional Fire Department and police began working together to figure out what worked as a communication network.
Back-up systems with 911 allowed those centres to keep running, but a lot of people who had working phones didn't know that and created a new problem.
Brendan Elliot of the Halifax Regional Municipality urged citizens to trying to call 911 unless necessary.
“Don't try 911 unless you absolutely need to, a lot of people are concerned that they may not be able to get through to 911, so they're trying it, what they does, it ties up our dispatchers from being able to respond to real emergencies,” said Elliot.
There were some issues with blank computer screens at Canadian blood services donation centres across Atlantic Canada as well, leaving blood clinics no choice but to turn donors away.
Kathy Gracie of Canadian Blood Services says this comes at the worst possible time as long weekends are when the demand for blood increases and donations decrease.
"We probably lost approximately 200 donations across Atlantic Canada today, so that impacts us even greater going into a long weekend,” said Gracie.
Municipal services including ferries and buses still kept running in Halifax.
“There's no impact to any of the scheduling, but there is an impact to the GPS system for the buses, and that's been down for the duration that the cellular coverage has been down,” said Nick Ritcey of HRM.
Paul Mason of the Nova Scotia Emergency Measures Organization said the organization got to work shortly after the initial outage occurred Friday morning.
“We activated our Provincial Coordination Centre, we reached out to our partners at the municipal level, and with the federal government, and some of our industry partners,” said Mason.
EMO was able to help disseminate information through emergency services. The organization said this crisis presented an opportunity.
Next week, there will be post-mortems on procedures and lessons learned about where mistakes may have been made and where more back-up systems are needed.
With files from CTV Atlantic's Ron Shaw.
