Burns Lake RCMP officers have been busy attending 911 calls in the region that were not made by people.
“We’ve getting a tremendous amount of abandoned 911s that are being caused by old phone lines that need to be upgraded,” said staff sergeant Charlotte Peters with the Burns Lake RCMP.
Peters explained that when the RCMP receive an abandoned 911 call, they are required to track down who that number is registered to, locate that person and confirm that they are in fact safe.
“We recently got a call for a resident on Beach Road, and it was a house that nobody was occupying, the windows were shut, the house was clean and 911 had got through from that residence,” described Peters. “If nobody is there, we then have to track down the person who lives there.”
Peters said many of these ‘ghost’ calls have originated from the Colleymount area, where there are lots of houses there that have older telephone wiring. Peters said this takes away a considerable amount of police time and resources.
According to Bill Miller, chair of the Regional District of Bulkley-Nechako (RDBN), these so-called ‘ghost’ calls have been occurring for a number of years in the region.
“The last time it was brought up at the [RDBN] board table, we had asked staff to investigate the causes; they discovered that it was a Telus issue,” he said. “We passed that information to Telus at that time.”
“Telus owns and are responsible for their infrastructure; however, we do pass on concerns on this and other related issues to them,” added Miller.
Richard Gilhooley, a spokesperson for Telus, said Telus has not been informed of the investigation conducted by regional district staff.
“The Telus network in Burns Lake and the surrounding areas is very stable, and over the years it has experienced very few outages or service issues,” said Gilhooley. “If the age of our infrastructure was the cause of any ongoing connectivity issues, we would expect more widespread problems beyond just Burns Lake; this has not been the case.”
“We will certainly investigate these concerns as part of ongoing assessments of our infrastructure and equipment to ensure uninterrupted access to emergency services,” he added.
Staff sergeant Peters said Telus may not have the motivation to address infrastructure issues in the area, and that local governments should work together to come up with a solution.
“Landlines are no longer important to them [Telus] because fewer and fewer people have them,” said Peters. “Some of the areas are remote, so it’s not cost effective for them to start replacing wires.”
“I think we have to work together with the village, regional district and Telus to try to come up with a solution, whether it be a request for an upgrade to the line; but I think it’s something that’s affecting us, and it’s a safety issue for the police,” she added. “And it’s a safety issue for the community, because we’re chasing around calls that we know aren’t true and it takes time away from productive investigations.”
E-Comm received a total of 696 ‘abandoned’ 911 calls for the month of April 2017 within the Regional District of Bulkley-Nechako. Of these calls, 20 per cent (142) were considered ‘abandoned.’ Abandoned calls include not only the calls that are caused by old phone lines, but also cases where people misdial 911, their phones die after dialing, or when people become incapacitated to communicate after dialing 911.