ANTIGONISH: Hurricane-strength Fiona was raging after midnight when Shawna MacDonald realized her 77-year-old mother’s landline was dead.
“It was very concerning given the fact that she was new that week to home oxygen and had been discharged after two and a half weeks in hospital on the Monday previous to the storm,” says the resident of Antigonish, an area hard hit by the destructive cyclone.
She made panicked attempts to reach her mother by phone and internet. She called the RCMP hoping they’d do a wellness check, but they declined, saying it wasn’t an emergency.
MacDonald gave up on the phone and, leaving her 27-year-old daughter who suffers from severe anxiety behind, went to check on her mother at daybreak in the height of the storm.
“The power went out in her home, so she was without oxygen for some time,” she says. “I live 10 minutes from her, thank goodness, but being the only immediate family member in Nova Scotia and having a daughter with high needs; it’s difficult to be in two places at once.”
Reports of non-working landlines, internet outages and spotty mobile phone service were widespread during Fiona and for well over a week in the storm’s aftermath, particularly by customers on the Northumberland Shore and Cape Breton. Many are still waiting for their phone and internet service to be restored.
In parts of Cape Breton’s Victoria County, the trunked mobile radio system first responders rely on to communicate was down for as long as seven hours on the day after Fiona hit, despite assurances from its operator, Bell Canada, that its systems were functioning fully during the storm.
Halifax, the South Shore and New Brunswick might not have experienced the same severity of outages as some parts of Atlantic Canada, but they aren’t immune as once-in-a-century storms become the norm.
The storm communication failures are leading to cries for tougher regulations from the Canada Radio-television and Telecommunications (CRTC), which oversees Bell, Eastlink and other telecom companies. A crackdown in the United States has made telecom giants there more accountable during storms. In Florida, for example, the state’s governor said 100 portable cellphone towers and 42,000 linesmen were geared up ahead of Hurricane Ian to tackle expected outages.
Sarah Butland, who works from her home in Frasers Mountain in rural Pictou County, says her mobile service with Bell Canada is spotty at the best of times.
“It was non-existent for three days, with only a few messages going through 30 or more minutes after being sent,” she says.
She’s waited over a week after her power came back on for her internet from City Wide, which uses Eastlink’s network. She says the company wasn’t forthcoming with a fix date, making it tough for her boss “to know what to do with me,” she says.
The poor communication on the part of communications companies is Butland’s biggest source of frustration.
“While it is amazing to see the teamwork of power companies, the community and local restaurants such as The Thistle step up, it is shocking to see how ambivalent communication companies have become,” she says.
Karen Fraser MacKay says her 86-year-old mother was without a landline, internet and TV for nine days.
“We were checking in on a daily basis,” says MacKay, who lives near her mother in the Hillside area in rural Pictou County. “She felt so cut off from the outside world. Thankfully power was restored on Thursday morning, so she at least had heat and electricity. Although we understand the magnitude of the damages from the storm, it certainly was nerve wracking not being able to communicate with her normal contacts. Our mom enjoys watching her shows and the news on TV and normally talks daily with friends or family members to help pass the time and feel connected. The worst part was knowing she didn’t have a phone in case of emergency.”
Landlines used to be a reliable form of communication, including for 911 emergency calls, no matter the weather. But Bell is swapping out its old underground copper wires for fibre-optic cable to sell high-speed internet and TV services. When the power goes out, so, too, do the phones, unless there is some sort of backup. The severity of Fiona meant Bell’s battery back-up power and generators for its wireless towers weren’t enough in some areas. And the copper wire that still proliferates in some rural areas suffered damage.
Premier Tim Houston blasted Canada’s telecom companies days after the storm, saying Eastlink, Rogers and Telus declined invitations to attend the province’s emergency management office (EMO) meetings in advance of the storm. He said Bell only sent a representative after complaints to senior leadership.
Houston said it’s unacceptable that Nova Scotians can’t dial 911 or call their loved ones or have any idea from the companies what they plan to do “to ensure this never happens again.”
After Hurricane Dorian knocked out cellphone and internet service in 2019, then Premier Stephen McNeil said telecom companies should be “in the room” so the EMO can get real-time information about damaged infrastructure and restoration efforts.
Eastlink’s executive vice chair, Lee Bragg, defended his company’s decision not to send a representative. In a media briefing on Fiona relief efforts, he said his team had a higher level of coordination with other telecom and infrastructure partners than during Hurricane Dorian or Hurricane Juan and was in constant communication with Canada’s federal innovation minister.
He said part of the solution to combat future outages is to authorize Nova Scotia Power to cut and trim more trees before they can take down lines.
Bell’s director of network operations, Geoff Moore, said during the same briefing that the storm’s impact was unprecedented “so outages are to be expected.”
The CRTC has asked communications companies serving the region for their outage statistics. A representative for the regulator said the figures wouldn’t be available by press time.
Roy Mulder, who lives in a hollow in the tiny community of Ardness in rural Pictou County, isn’t waiting around for a crackdown or better service from the incumbents.
While he’d prefer to buy Canadian and isn’t a fan of Elon Musk, he opted to try the billionaire entrepreneur’s Starlink satellite high-speed internet service after getting bills that ranged from $250 to $530 a month from Bell for a sluggish service. The bills, which ran high because of the large amounts of data Mulder and his wife use, didn’t include their mobile phones.
He says Fiona hit his home full force, knocking down trees all over, but didn’t knock out his internet.
“Starlink’s been a game changer,” he said in an interview from his neighbour’s driveway, the only place he could find to get a decent cell-phone signal.
It cost close to $1,000 in equipment to set up and the monthly bill is $161 for unlimited data, but it’s reliable and “lightning fast” so worth the expense, he says.
Mulder says his neighbours are also opting for Starlink.
He says he’ll be signing up for cell phone, too, once the satellite company introduces the service.
“It’s a safety issue,” he says. “There are a lot of elderly people in the area.”
From Antigonish, MacDonald says it took two days after the power was restored for her mother to get a dial tone on her landline. She’s gotten no answers from the provider, Eastlink, to give her peace of mind ahead of the next storm.
“I explained I had purchased her a regular phone, not a portable, to ensure she would have the ability to contact someone in the event she needed assistance,” she says. “I was given the same rehearsed speech that they were working on the issues, and they would be giving everyone a data top-up to help during the aftermath of the storm. I tried to relay the fact that was useless to my mother as she didn’t have a cell phone.”