BT has declared an emergency in the Isle of Arran, Northern Ireland and North Wales after winter conditions caused thousands of extra repairs to phone and broadband kit.
Telecoms infrastructure arm Openreach said repairs were under control for most of the UK, with outstanding tasks expected to peak at 27,000 by next Tuesday, April 2.
Engineers have agreed to work additional overtime across the Easter weekend, and quadruple their planned overtime next week to keep their job list at typical levels for April.
Read more about BT Openreach repairsRob Lee, marketing director for BT Openreach, said: “The extreme cold and severer weather have continued to impact, particularly across Northern Ireland, Northern England and Scotland, with overhead and underground network damage.
“The sheer quantity of snow in some areas has brought down overhead lines, and not only ours as there have been electricity outages lasting for a number of days.
”As a result, we have seen a higher number of complex repairs, extended travel times and access issues for our engineering teams to tackle.”
The entire Isle of Arran area has been hit by a Matter Beyond Our Reasonable Control declaration, affecting lines connected to the Shiskine, Machrie, Lochranza and Pirnmill exchanges.
Openreach said engineers tackled 143,000 jobs last week, but numerous faults caused the daily to-do list to rise from 24,000 on Friday to more than 30,000 on Tuesday, March 26.
Despite this, it completed 210,000 installation jobs in the past month, and is connecting new copper services within just over 12 days of customer orders.
Image: Ian D/Flickr
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