This website uses cookies primarily for visitor analytics. Certain pages will ask you to fill in contact details to receive additional information. On these pages you have the option of having the site log your details for future visits. Indicating you want the site to remember your details will place a cookie on your device. To view our full cookie policy, please click here. You can also view it at any time by going to our Contact Us page.

Alberta electrical explosion causes communications blackout

13 July 2012

An explosion in an electrical room at Shaw Communications’ headquarters in Calgary led to a communications blackout across the city and surrounding districts on July 11. The blackout affected radio stations, internet services, hospital computers, government networks and some Shaw phone customers’ access to 911 services in the city’s core. 

Shaw president Peter Bissonnette said the outage started with a "flash incident." The building was evacuated and no one was hurt.

A fire broke out in a transformer on the 13th floor, but as the backup system came on, the sprinklers took it down. "Water and electricity aren’t a good combination," Bissonnette said.

Earlier in the day, city officials activated the municipal emergency plan while gauging the magnitude of the service outages and their ramifications.

"Shaw is a very large telecommunications company," said Calgary Emergency Management Agency director Bruce Burrell. "We’ve had an electrical explosion in one of their buildings and it has disabled that particular building. That building is a hub of information for a number of clients, not just in the city of Calgary, but some of them are provincial and some, in fact, are national."

Bissonnette said phone service was lost for about 4,000 residential and 16,000 business customers in downtown Calgary.

Alberta Health Services said that several of the medical board’s administrative and clinical information systems were hit by the outage.




Print this page | E-mail this page