If a fibre line falls in the forest, not many people hear it

Fort Simpson lost phone and internet on Friday evening. Chief Kele Antoine used his brother’s Starlink to tell the outside world in a Facebook post.

A wildfire had damaged the fibre line that serves the isolated Northwest Territories village of just under 1,500 people.

This keeps happening in the NWT. Fort Simpson similarly lost connectivity last year, and towns like Hay River and Fort Smith lost nearly all ability to communicate at the exact moment they were ordering thousands of residents to flee fires in 2023. The outages lasted nearly a week.

Chief Antoine, who leads the Łı́ı́dlı̨ı̨ Kų́ę́ First Nation in Fort Simpson, says we are not treating these outages like the emergencies they are.

When you see footage of a wildfire or a flood, you immediately get some sense of the danger a community faces. Lines of vehicles leaving town? Clearly big trouble.

Communications outages, by default, come with almost none of that because people lose the ability to transmit those pictures, and there’s not much to see even if they could. The danger isn’t as palpable.

But Fort Simpson’s residents couldn’t call the police. They couldn’t call the health centre or the fire department. They couldn’t contact loved ones. Stores often can’t accept electronic payments in these circumstances, so you’d better have cash. Parts of government can’t function, or at least not nearly as well.

“Forest fire evacuations and those major, serious issues? They take precedence. But we’re kind-of left here in the dark,” said Chief Antoine.

“We’ve become so accustomed to having connection at our very fingertips at every second. When that goes down, it’s very difficult.

“Thankfully, there is this new technology of low-Earth satellite internet.”

Relaying messages

Antoine spoke with Cabin Radio using Facebook Messenger’s voice calling option while hooked up to Starlink, which relies on satellites rather than cables on the ground. (Early on Sunday morning, some connectivity began returning to the community.)

A small number of homes, businesses and institutions in Fort Simpson have Starlink dishes. At the village office or outside a home near the highway, you could pull up and share a dish to get online and contact family and friends, or maybe update people on Facebook or Instagram.

One family opened up their deck to let friends watch the Edmonton Oilers game on Friday night, streamed via Starlink.

The Northwest Territories is gradually becoming a giant Starlink advertisement, with residents and governments rapidly adopting the technology to cope with the vulnerability of fibre.

“It’s making a big difference,” said Antoine, who added he had written to Starlink to ask if it could help the First Nation out – for example, by sending more equipment – during this emergency and to prepare for future ones.

“It’s allowing you and I to talk right now. It’s allowed our healthcare and police officials to remain in contact with their counterparts in Yellowknife and other areas,” he continued.

“A lot of us have been running around and relaying messages to loved ones, just letting them know that people are thinking of them.”

‘We need serious investment’

The fibre problem is part of a larger issue: infrastructure.

If Fort Simpson had a permanent bridge, not an ice crossing that turns into a summer ferry service, residents would sweat much less about supplies getting in – or people getting out, if the village’s island needs to be evacuated.

And if the village’s connectivity could withstand wildfire season, local leaders wouldn’t have the added frustration of figuring out how to talk to residents and the world beyond during moments of crisis. (Northwestel says two different fibre lines went down this time, meaning Fort Simpson got cut off even with a backup in play. Often, NWT communities are only served by one.)

“We need some serious investment here. I think there’s a good opportunity to put a lot of our people to work, to really invest in the North,” said Antoine.

“We can’t be talking about ‘should we do it?’ any more. We need to talk about ‘we need to get it done.'”

That’s if anyone can be reached to talk at all.