When Welwyn Garden City exchange experienced a partial community isolation back in early Feb 2012, BT mobilised resources from across the business to respond and restore services.
Engineers from Openreach and BT Operate endured minus 14C temperatures to restore connections to emergency services after cable thieves damaged multiple BT cables. The incident was pinpointed to a section of cable along the A1 near Hatfield, Hertfordshire and teams worked round the clock in extreme conditions to restore services.
A BT Silver Command Team was quickly established with a senior incident manager from BT Operate at one of BT’s Incident Management Centres bringing together a pan BT virtual team with the senior incident manager acting as Silver Commander.
Thieves severed five Fibre cables, causing loss of telephony and 999 services to 3,500 users, and loss of broadband for 4,500 users, as well as a core network transmission failure.
Communications to a number of police and ambulance stations and hospitals in the area were affected and BT worked to ensure all services were fixed and all fibre repaired as quickly as possible.