Montreal police, firefighters concerned by emergency communications outage

The unionsrepresentingMontreal police and firefighters are sounding the alarmafter the City of Montreal's emergency telecommunications system was down on Monday for two hours.

It was the second outage for thecity-wide emergency radionetwork, known as SERAM,in less than a week.

The City of Montreal hasspent $70 million on the system. It has been in operation since 2014.

But the unions representing the city's police officers and firefighters have not been impressedandhavelodged a complaint with the workplace health and safety board.

• Telecommunications outage hits Montreal police, fire department

Chris Ross, vice-president of thefirefighters'union, said theyhad to use cell phones to send information back to the communications centre.

He said the system has been beset by problems since the beginning.

"Almost immediately, they started to have problems with it to the point where we had to pull it out of service," he said.

We've had some recurring issues with it.- Chris Ross, VP of Montreal'sfirefighters'union

"And it was brought back in almost a year later, and in the past couple of months that it's been online we've had some recurring issues with it, including twice in the past week where it's crashed. Each time we're explained that it was sort of a freak of nature, and that it won't happen again. And a few days later it happens again."

On Monday, the technical problems started around 12 p.m. andservice came back around 2 p.m., according to the city.

"The outage took place during work that was underway on the network by the provider," Valrie De Gagn, a spokesperson for the City of Montreal, said in a statement.

"Not in any moment was the safety of citizens ever in jeopardy."

De Gagn saidthe city is taking steps to ensure it doesn't happen again.

Quebec courts were also paralyzeddue to an unrelatedcomputer outage during the day.