Editor, The Times:
Sometime between 6 p.m., Friday, Jan. 23 and Saturday morning someone with an over-height vehicle, perhaps someone with a logging truck, drove through the Medical Centre parking lot from the Sportsplex side and caught the telephone line and fibre-optic cable.
The telephone lines were pulled from their connection in the basement, the fibre-optic cable pulled the staples out of the wall in our basement and eventually snapped in the pipe to the roof. The roof-top mast was bent over at 90 degrees and the broken line was left lying in our parking lot. There was also damage to the attachment to the main Telus lines.
It is hard for me to imagine that whoever was responsible didn’t realize that this had occurred.
I would like to thank members of my staff who observed the downed lines on Saturday morning. I would also like to thank Rick Ebert who committed significant amounts of time on Sunday doing repair work to the mast and other structures and to Larry Symons for providing some of the necessary materials.
I would also like to thank Telus for their rapid and effective response. Their crews were here both Saturday evening and Sunday working on the system until close to 10 o’clock so that we could be operational again on Monday morning.
Without this effort we would have had neither the phones or access to our electronic medical records. Telus’ rapid and extensive support is much appreciated.
Hopefully the camera at the Sportsplex that points to the back of our building will be helpful in finding the person responsible. If anybody has any further information about this incident I would appreciate them contacting the RCMP.
John A. Soles, M.D.
Clearwater, B.C.
