Calgary enacted their municipal emergency plan Wednesday after an explosion and fire at the downtown Shaw Building threw telecommunications in the city into chaos.
The incident in the building knocked out communications to critical services, including the 9-1-1 phone service, fire stations, Alberta Health Services and corporate call centres.
Shaw’s telephone and television services were also disrupted.
Approximately 30, 000 people in the downtown core lost telephone service. Internet and cell phone service was also disrupted.
Other parts of the province were reporting similar issues.
The building acts as a major network hub for the region, said Bruce Berrell of the Calgary Emergency management Agency.
Berrell said the emergency plan was enacted based on the recommendation of the deputy chief of the fire department.
By enacting the emergency plan, the city may call in the police, emergency crews, Enmax officials and “anybody that can help us with the issues,” said Berrell.
Berrell said his team was still trying to assess the scope and impact of the outage.
"Alberta Health Services network is completely dead at the moment. We're trying to determine whether or not the CP Rail information centre (is affected),” he said.
Berrell assured residents that despite the outage, patient care was not being compromised "because there are paper records for all the patients that are in the hospitals. It does impact their data management system that they record the records in."
In an effort to keep residents updated, Berrell said the agency would be sending out regular tweets.
Typically any updates would be issued on local television stations, but Shaw customers would not be able to receive the updates, he said.
Berrell said the cause of the explosion has not yet been determined.
Police report that a suspected electrical fire sparked around 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon on the 13th floor of the building.
The building was evacuated and the disruption was so large it knocked three Calgary radio stations off the air.
With a report from CTV Calgary’s Melissa Carpenter and files from The Canadian Press
