Service restored to police, fire non-emergency lines in Metro Vancouver: E-Comm

The non-emergency lines for many police and fire departments in the Lower Mainland were unavailable for several hours Saturday.

The lines went down around 1:30 p.m. but were back up and running by 7:45 p.m.

"At this time we continue to ask people to file non-urgent crime reports online if possible, as techs continue to monitor the stability of the lines," a tweet from E-Comm said.

Earlier, the dispatch service cited "technical issue" as the reason for the outage.

A spokesperson, in a statement, stressed that 911 service remained fully operational.

"To be very clear, 911 services are stable and are not being impacted by these technical issues. We are not seeing a noticeable increase of 911 calls related to these technical issues – we greatly appreciate the public’s assistance in keeping these lines free for emergencies only," the email says.

"As this situation is currently unfolding, we do not have a lot of details to share at this time."

Non-emergency lines for the ambulance service were unaffected, as are non-emergency lines for police on Vancouver Island.

Non-emergency lines are set up to deal with any calls in which an immediate dispatch of first responders is not required, for example, reporting a crime that is not currently in progress. A list of options for online reporting is available here.