Chris Lowrey
PONTIAC August 6, 2017
The phone lines throughout vast swaths of the upper Pontiac went silent last week during an unexpected disruption in the region’s land-line network.
The outage happened on Sept. 19 just before 1 p.m. and cut the phone lines to Mansfield-et-Pontefract, Fort Coulonge, Waltham, Allumettes Island, Chichester and Sheenboro.
For many people, the phone lines were down for a matter of a few hours but some people were without service around 10 hours.

“Some areas were restored earlier,” said MRC Pontiac spokesperson Danielle Belec. “But at its worst it lasted until 4 o’clock in the morning in some areas.”
The outage occurred in the area of Hwy. 148 east of Fort Coulonge near the Domaine des Marquis mobile home park.
The outage meant that residents wouldn’t even get a dial tone when they picked up their receivers.
One of the main concerns is that if an emergency had happened while the outage was going on, those who are affected wouldn’t have been able to call 911.
The region doesn’t have an emergency backup line in the case of an outage like this.
“It is the security of citizens that is at stake,” Warden Raymond Durocher said in a press release. “I understand that the installation of an emergency line is expensive, but how much is the life of a human being worth?”
The only way residents would have been able to get in touch with emergency services would be by cell phone.
But even with this option as a backup plan, the cell service in the area has been known to be spotty, which further limits people’s options.
The cause of the outage has not been confirmed as the Sûreté du Québec finishes its investigation.
It appears as though the outage was caused when a Bell fibre optic cable was severed. It’s not yet clear what severed the cord, although a logging crew was working in the area according to Belec.
This is especially concerning given that this was the fifth outage in the last nine years.
It is unclear how many people were affected by the outage.