Canadian telecoms work on strengthening networks amid growing wildfire activity

Companies and regulators in Canada are taking note of the need for resilient telecom networks amid growing wildfire activity in remote regions.

As wind-driven wildfires broke out on the Hawaiian island of Maui last summer, killing more than 100 people and destroying thousands of buildings, a telecommunications blackout kept many residents in the dark.

The outage exacerbated an already devastating situation in areas such as the town of Lahaina, home to around 13,000 people, where both evacuation orders and first responders’ emergency communications were hampered.

In addition to the downing of all cellphones and landlines in Lahaina, the area also faced a failure of commercial electrical service for days.

Authorities are still putting together the pieces to understand how so much went wrong throughout the incident. A key lesson from the Maui wildfires has emerged: resilient telecom networks are crucial when disaster strikes.

Companies and regulators in other jurisdictions, including Canada, are taking note amid growing wildfire activity in remote regions.

“We need to understand what the limitations of networks might be and also have plans that would account for the possible loss of our typical sources of information,” said Jenifer Sunrise Winter, a communications professor at University of Hawaii at Manoa.

“Ideally you’ll have multiple options in case something fails.”

Last month, wildfire damage to fibre lines near Fort Nelson, B.C. caused days-long cellular and internet outages in the province’s north, as well as in Yukon and the Northwest Territories.