What exactly was Northwestel dealing with?

For a second year, wildfire damage is causing major problems to phone and internet services in northern Canada.

On Sunday morning, services were getting back to normal after an outage that lasted for more than a day. Last year, the damage caused days-long blackouts at the height of the NWT’s wildfire crisis.

This time, Northwestel – the company that runs the North’s all-important fibre-optic cables – was faced with separate fires taking out the line near Fort Nelson in northern BC and along Highway 1 in the Dehcho.

What does the damage look like? What was needed to fix it? And was this weekend’s outage just a fluke or something more significant?

We asked Tammy April, Northwestel’s vice-president of customer experience.

This interview was recorded on May 12, 2024. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ollie Williams: As of Sunday morning, what is the situation for Northwest Territories communities right now? Where are we at?

Tammy April: The situation is greatly improved. We were able to repair the fibre line last night heading to Fort Nelson. All communities in the Northwest Territories have access to all services, although the Mackenzie Valley fibre line is congested from Fort Simpson up to Inuvik.

We have crews heading to the site to do repairs for that. We’ve been given access to the Northwest Territories fibre damage, so we are hoping that – fires willing and with no unexpected surprises – everything will be back up to full speed by the end of the day today.

Give us an overview of what exactly Northwestel has been facing here. Where were the various incidents and what, exactly, did you have to deal with?

One of the ways to think about our connectivity in the North is like a traffic circle.

The top part of the traffic circle is kind-of a gravel road, so you have to go a little more slowly. That’s why you’re seeing the congestion right now.

For the Yukon and Mackenzie Valley, Beaufort Delta areas, we’ve got two exits out of that traffic circle.

One of them goes through Fort Nelson and, of course, we know about the devastating fires that are happening there. The fires, unfortunately, burned several kilometres of our infrastructure, which would normally mean we route traffic through our other exit, which goes through Jean Marie River and Kakisa. Of course, in the Northwest Territories, all of you are very aware of what’s happened in that region. And again, we had about five kilometres of infrastructure damage there.

The fire was more out of control in the Northwest Territories and it’s taken us longer to be able to gain access. Last night, crews were able to finally get in safely and review the damage that had occurred. This morning, they’re heading to the site to repair it.

I don’t think many of us really know what it looks like when a wildfire damages a fibre line and what it takes to fix it. What are technicians turning up to? Is it just a melted mess on the floor and then string a new cable? What are they seeing? What are they having to do?

In both cases, we’ve had a lot to deal with.

Trees are in some cases over the fibre line or over the area where we need to run the temporary cable, so they’re having to remove those trees out of the way. We’ve also got situations where trees have been damaged by fire but haven’t fallen and they’re having to make sure those are removed safely as well.

There is equipment they need to ensure everything is placed correctly. That also means we need a certain level of access to the site. In this case, some of the fibre looked OK but there have been little bumps on it showing that it’s been melted, so they’re having to test certain strands.

In some areas, poles have been damaged so they’re having to look at laying temporary cable on the ground. We also have electronics in the ground and I’ve seen pictures from yesterday’s repairs in Fort Nelson where, rather than seeing a coil of cable and some electronics components, it’s simply just a scorched pit with ash in it. The heat of the fire has been causing some pretty extreme damage.

This outage involved multiple fibre lines being damaged at once. Is that a fluke? Is it just bad luck? Or is it a more meaningful and concerning development than that?

I would say this is a bad-luck fluke. We could have multiple impacts to our fibre in different places without having the kind of severe impacts we’re seeing.

The fact that the fire hit these two locations in such a short period of time is not something we’ve seen before and, knock on wood, we wouldn’t be seeing again. The line between Jean Marie River and Kakisa went down sometime Friday afternoon and then, a matter of hours later, we saw the infrastructure in Fort Nelson go down.

I don’t think I’m telling Northwestel anything it doesn’t already know when I say that events like this are driving uptake of services like Starlink. I know, though, that Northwestel has signed low-Earth orbit partnerships of its own. Is the intention that at some point, Northwestel will offer satellite service similar to Starlink on a more broad basis, the way Starlink offers it right now? Should we expect that kind of offering for northern residential customers? Or is the company’s focus more along the lines of fibre and figuring out how to make that more resilient?

We definitely are focused on fibre.

We do have a partnership with OneWeb. We use that in some of our satellite-fed communities to offer internet services to residents there. Beyond that, we are focused on fibre.

Outages happen. They happen for us, they’ve happened for Starlink, they’ve happened for Meta. We are doing our best to try to protect our infrastructure. But at the end of the day, we can offer quality, reliable high-speed access through fibre that, at this point, low-Earth orbit services just aren’t able to to do. We can also support a level of traffic through our fibre that neither we nor any other service on LEO would be able to support.

Is the game changing in terms of protecting fibre and making that more resilient? Is it getting more difficult?

Some of those climate change events that we’re seeing are making it more difficult, but protecting fibre has been an issue for as long as fibre has been around.

We have extensive brushing programs that we undertake to try to keep flammable materials from being near our lines. Last year, we saw fires pass over a certain area of fibre two or three times and the brushing saved us. Unfortunately, that can’t always be the case.

We’ve also seen images where fibre has actually been on fire as a result of the temperatures. And of course, electronics can suffer from smoke and heat damage as well, which is some of what we’re having to learn to contend with.

I would like to really express thanks to all of our technicians, operations, IT folks, our engineers who have been working so diligently over the weekend to restore services. I can’t say enough for the dedication that I’ve seen from these folks to try to ensure that services are restored as quickly as possible. And of course a huge thank-you to those who are fighting the fires and trying to keep homes safe.