We have undertaken an extensive seismic upgrade program focusing on major buildings in areas that are considered higher risk earthquake zones. Most of our major equipment buildings are classed as post-disaster structures because telephone service is essential in a disaster or emergency. Our switches are braced for an earthquake with uninterrupted power supply and stand-by power in the form of generators and batteries.

Network Operations Centre
Our Provincial Network Operations Centre is at the heart of our emergency planning and recovery program. Through this centre, we monitor all telecommunications activity in Alberta and BC around the clock. If there's an outage, our network operations centre automatically senses the traffic disruption. It then reroutes calls through another part of the network. We maintain a fully functional back-up network operations centre that we will use if the main centre is damaged in a disaster.

Your cooperation
As good as this system is, in the event of an emergency, we will need the cooperation of our customers to limit their phone use to essential communications. Earthquakes in other areas, such as California and Kobe, Japan, have shown us that while switches and lines have generally remained intact, heavy calling volumes and power outages have posed problems for telecommunications.