SaskTel restores services for about 1,000 customers following Spiritwood fire

About 1,000 residents in the town of Spiritwood and area were without SaskTel services for nearly 10 full days at the end of August.

The services included cellular, internet and landline as well as the ability to call 911. The cause of the widespread outage was a fire in SaskTel’s central distribution offices.

Michelle Englot, SaskTel’s director of corporate communications, joined 650 CKOM’s Brent Loucks on Wednesday morning to give an update on the situation.

“As of noon (Tuesday), services have been fully restored in all of the communities in Spiritwood, and surrounding communities,” Englot said.

“All SaskTel services were down. We had a fire that occurred (on Aug. 22). It took out, basically, one of our central distribution offices in Spiritwood.”

Englot explained that the fire impacted two of its buildings. They housed various central transport and core network gear, which was destroyed by the fire.

She explained that, at the same time, things could have been worse.

“We were lucky, actually, that the tower right beside the building and the fibre services (were not) impacted,” Englot said. “It was a very significant fire.”

Englot mentioned that a similar but not as serious fire occurred in Pierceland “a number of years ago,” but nothing to the extent of Spiritwood’s blaze on Aug. 22.

She explained that with the strong reliance on services such as cellular, internet and home phone, it was imperative that crews restore the services as quickly as possible.

“Twenty years ago, people didn’t rely on it as much. They had two-way radios and things like that …,” she said. “There (are) different ways, and I think that’s one of the lessons learned. People do need to have (business) continuity plans (in place) for (events) like this.”

Fire investigators are still at the scene, according to Englot. As of now, there is no cause of origin for the blaze.