Officials in Calgary deactivated their municipal emergency plan on Thursday, saying 911 service was functioning normally again a day after a downtown fire and explosion at Shaw Communications headquarters.
But the situation remained far from normal for Shaw customers, some banks, several radio stations and anyone who required any sort of electronic records from the Alberta government.
“We’ve been working through the evening and early morning to evaluate the impact on the data centre to try to minimize the impact on services to citizens,” Service Alberta Minister Manmeet Bhullar said in a news release.
Services that remained unavailable included vehicle registration and licensing, student high school transcripts, land title searches and hunting and fishing licences. Provincial programs that provide income support and health benefits, such as payments to disabled Albertans, were also affected, although the province said emergency claims could still be processed in person.
No one was hurt when a blast in a 13th-floor electrical room on Wednesday brought down Alberta Health Services computers, put three radio stations off the air and affected some banking services.
Lines to many critical communications services, including 911, were interrupted or unavailable for Shaw customers on Wednesday and early Thursday. Calgary’s municipal 311 information service was also affected. The city said Thursday that the line was fully operational again, although some city call centres were still experiencing service disruptions.
ATB Financial said some of its banking services were affected by the disruption. The company’s website remained down on Thursday, and bill payments could not be made online or at banking machines, according to company spokesman Glenn Kubish.
“We’re doing a lot of our communication through Twitter, actually,” Kubish said.
The Shaw building also houses three radio stations – CHQR, Country 105 and Q107 – and those stations were running programming from sister stations in Edmonton on Thursday.
Fire Chief Bruce Burrell said it’s still too early to say what caused the fire but he said there was a significant amount of water throughout the building. He said that safety inspectors were at the site on Thursday but anticipated it would take time before it would be safe for employees to re-enter.
“The fire was basically on the 13th floor and certainly I saw water trickling down through cracks in the floors, and down through the pipe chases when I was there last night, on the second and third floor. So it had travelled a fair distance through the building,” Burrell said.
The city said Shaw was continuing to work with its phone and data customers to restore normal service.
Shaw has said that getting the Alberta Health Services up and running again was its highest priority.
