Telecoms promise better service during Hurricane Lee

Telecommunications firms Bell and Eastlink are promising their networks will perform better during Hurricane Lee than they did last year when post-tropical storm Fiona caused widespread and long-lasting outages.

Representatives from both companies joined government officials for a news conference Friday afternoon ahead of the expected landfall of Hurricane Lee.

They said they’ve added backup generators to keep their systems running in the case of power outages. In the case of Bell, there are an additional 150 fixed generators across the Atlantic provinces, which provide backup to 63 per cent of the company’s cell towers.

Eastlink has added 20 new fixed generators in Nova Scotia. Eastlink also added capacity to its mobile network in anticipation of increased traffic, its official said.

Can’t control Mother Nature

Although the two companies gave assurances their networks are better prepared this year than last, they cautioned that disruptions cannot always be avoided.

“There’s things in terms of damage caused by the storm that I can’t control and that’s where we’re just going to need to make sure we have the right response mechanisms in place,” said Geoff Moore, Bell’s network director for Atlantic Canada.

Eastlink’s Crissy Baillie echoed that.

“We certainly cannot control what Mother Nature is about to bring forth,” said Baillie, Eastlink’s senior director of field operations. “[But] we fully expect a better performance from the network with the capacity we’ve added and the investments we’ve made in our backup systems.”

No details on compensation for outages

When asked about providing compensation in the event of service disruptions, both said they would respond as needed. Neither company would offer any details.

“We’re going to do right by our customers,” said Baillie. 

“As the storm unfolds and we decide what needs to be done from that perspective – account management – we will certainly do it [on a] case-by-case basis.”

“We want to work with facts, we want to understand what happened, the magnitude of the impact, before we make any decision like that,” said Moore.

Both said they’ve stocked up on fuel for their generators ahead of the storm – a response to running out of fuel in the wake of Fiona.

Moore said Bell has staff in Quebec and Ontario on standby should they be needed to help with repairs.

Nova Scotia Power trimming trees

Nova Scotia Power also has extra crews at the ready.

• If the power or data on your device is low, get your storm updates on CBC Lite. It’s our low-bandwidth, text-only website.

Matt Drover, the utility’s senior director of energy delivery, said NSP staff and contractors are being sent across the province. But he said the focus will be on the southwest, which is forecast to experience the worst of the storm.

“We expect those will be the areas that have the highest winds and have the highest impact on trees,” said Drover.

There are over 600 NSP workers in the field, including power line technicians, forestry workers and damage assessors, a spokesperson said.

He added that over the past year, the utility trimmed or removed over 10,000 trees that were weakened by Fiona at a cost of $32 million. He said the utility plans to spend another $40 million next year to get trees as far away from power lines as possible.