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BT starts to push back on summer storm damage in Belfast, Luton and North-West England

BT Openreach has lifted emergency status from its engineers in Luton, Lancashire, Stoke and Chester, and Belfast.

Engineers remain hard at work repairing flood and lightning damage in 22 areas including the rest of Northern Ireland outside Belfast.

Openreach, which looks after the BT network between the exchange and customer homes, saw around 22 per cent more fault reports than it expected – around 7,500 more than the peak during 2012’s rainy summer.

BT starts to push back on summer storm damage in Belfast, Luton and North-West England
Openreach is hard at work fixing flood repairs this summer

Read more about Why Hasn’t BT Openreach Fixed My Broadband?Openreach said: “We have been taking action to meet the additional demands of a greatly increased fault intake following the impacts of the lightning damage and flash flooding across much of the UK.

“We believe we are well equipped to have recovered the situation nationally by 16 August, with many areas reaching levels of normality before this date.”

The company had around 33,000 outstanding repairs at the end of July, but was expecting to clear more than 145,000 per week, with an 11-day delay on first appointments nationwide.

As of August 2, the following areas were under a Matters Beyond Our Reasonable Control (MBORC) declaration:

  • West Central Scotland 
  • West Yorkshire 
  • Humber 
  • Birmingham & Black Country 
  • Newport Severnside 
  • Aylesbury 
  • Romford 
  • Province (Northern Ireland) 
  • North East Scotland 
  • South West Scotland 
  • Central Scotland 
  • South East Scotland 
  • Cumbria 
  • Derby & Nottingham 
  • Leicester 
  • Coventry 
  • Northampton 
  • Swindon 
  • Peterborough 
  • Southend 
  • Cambridge & Chelmsford 
  • East Downs 

The MBORC declaration allows BT Openreach to ignore its contractual time limits for meeting customer appointments.

Image: AndyRobertsPhotos/Flickr

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