TELUS says copper theft responsible for service disruption in southeast Calgary

Hundreds of group are waiting to person their landline work restored successful southeast Calgary aft an outage that started connected Sunday night.

A TELUS spokesperson said successful an email to Global News that copper thefts severely damaged TELUS cables successful and astir Ogden, disrupting location phone, net and TV work for immoderate customers.

While TV and net services were restored by Monday morning, TELUS said 650 customers are still waiting to person their landline work restored.

“We’re waiting for telephone calls from my wife’s doctors and from my doctors,” said Ogden resident Kelly LaRocque. “I’ve been trying to telephone everyone and springiness them an replacement number.”

The Millican Ogden Community Association (MOCA) said it’s doing its champion to make group alert of nan outage, but added it’s reliable to scope group who don’t person entree to a machine aliases nan internet.

“You ever perceive astir nan net going down, but a landline going down, it virtually is simply a lifeline for immoderate people, ” said MOCA caput Zev Klymochko.

TELUS said that crews are moving connected splicing cables to reconstruct work and person reported nan incident to nan Calgary Police Service (CPS).

CPS said betwixt January and April location person been much than 100 copper ligament thefts reported and astir 300 were reported successful 2023.

“We are looking into allegations of a copper ligament theft incident that could person caused nan outage,” CPS said successful an email to Global News. “More accusation will beryllium shared erstwhile available.”

Frustrated residents are now questioning what much tin beryllium done to protect these services.

“Let’s extremity nan waste of nan stolen copper, aliases make it difficult aliases immoderate you request to do,” LaRocque said.

The Canadian Telecommunications Association said crossed nan country, incidents of theft and vandalism person accrued astir 200 per cent since 2022.

“Rising incidents of theft and vandalism targeting telecommunications sites are progressively causing work outages successful communities crossed nan country,” said Nick Kyonka pinch nan Canadian Telecommunications Association.

“These acts perchance make it intolerable to interaction 911 aliases different thief successful nan arena of an emergency, disrupt lives and business and effect hospitals and different captious services. These are not victimless crimes.”

Yonka added telecom providers person taken steps to summation information astir compartment sites and captious infrastructure and are advocating for nan national authorities to summation penalties for these crimes.

TELUS said it has invested successful information cameras, specialized locks and fencing to combat copper theft.

The institution expects landline work to beryllium afloat restored connected Aug. 3.