JOSHUA ALLAN
The 1019 Report
The MRC Vaudreuil-Soulanges is asking the federal government for assistance to improve its telecommunications infrastructure to avoid a repeat of the chaos caused last month when the 911 and 311 emergency phone services collapsed as the remnants of Tropical Storm Debby ravaged the region with heavy rains, causing flooding in many areas.
“We remain concerned about this situation,” said Patrick Bousez, prefect of the MRC of Vaudreuil-Soulanges, in response to questions from The 1019 Report.
Bousez explained that the “overloading of cellular networks and communication towers” were the main vulnerabilities the emergency lines experienced on the evening of Aug. 9 during the height of the storm.
The region’s 911 and 311 emergency lines received more than 1,500 calls between 6 p.m. and midnight that day, MRC officials claim, as heavy rains sent rivers of water down some residential streets and flooded thousands of basements in some areas of the region.
The 911 call centre is able to simultaneously accept 16 calls, but reached a peak of more than 100 new calls every 15 minutes between 6 p.m. and 9:30 p.m., overloading the telecommunications network, according to authorities. This resulted in difficulty for some calls to go through to operators, while some calls were involuntarily re-directed to 911 service centres outside of the region.
See EMERGENCY, Page 2.
EMERGENCY: 311 helpline had complete outage during Aug. 9 storm
From Page 1
“It’s not the 911 system that was down,” explained Catherine St-Amour, communications officer with the MRC Vaudreuil-Soulanges. “It’s the communication towers that can’t handle the call capacity.”
She added there was no shortage of call centre agents on hand that day.
The 311 service, on the other hand, experienced a complete outage that lasted several hours that evening.
MRC officials suspects a computer system failure was the cause. Bousez said the region is working with the 311 centre “to ensure that this technical problem does not recur.”
The city of Vaudreuil-Dorion, which saw about 1,400 dwellings impacted by flood waters, notified citizens via its Facebook page of the emergency line overload.
“We are in an emergency situation,” read the city’s post on the social media platform on Aug. 9. “311 and 911 are overwhelmed.”
Vaudreuil-Dorion representatives were invited to a meeting with MRC officials on Monday to “take stock and identify possible improvements that could be implemented,” said city spokesperson Jessica Genest.
Genest did not offer whether this meeting alleviated the concerns of municipal officials.
Bousez noted that in June 2023, he spoke before the federal Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities, calling for improvements to the region’s telecommunications infrastructure network.
He pointed out that events like the deluge Aug. 9 demonstrate that “we’re going to need more help from governments to adapt infrastructures to these increasingly frequent climatic hazards.”
The MRC “will continue to make its case, as will a number of other municipalities and MRCs facing the same challenge elsewhere in Quebec,” Bousez wrote in a statement.