A Manitoba family is taking Telus to court after a 911 service outage left them unable to get help while a loved one suffered a fatal heart attack.
The lawsuit, filed in the Court of King’s Bench on behalf of Greg Switzer and his family, stems from the death of 55-year-old Dean Switzer on March 23 last year.
According to the Winnipeg Free Press, family and friends near Fisher Branch frantically placed 22 calls to 911 while performing CPR for 90 minutes. Instead of help, they received a recorded message that said “hang up and call back later.”
Every person trying to reach emergency services that night was a Telus customer. Help only arrived after a neighbour managed to contact an off-duty RCMP officer, who drove to a detachment to call for an ambulance. Paramedics arrived 15 minutes later, but Switzer was pronounced dead at the scene.
The family’s statement of claim argues that the telecom giant failed in its duty to provide continuous access to emergency services. “The plaintiff states that Dean’s death was the direct result of the breaches of the defendant,” the court papers say, as cited by the WFP. “The plaintiff says that Dean would have received the care he required within a reasonable time, such that he would have survived the heart attack had the 911 service been operational.”
The lawsuit alleges Telus lacked proper monitoring systems and failed to alert customers to the failure or reroute calls to other carriers as required by federal regulations. Further, the family claims it was “reasonably foreseeable to the defendant that their failure to provide uninterrupted and continuing access to 911 operator and service could result in serious harm and/or death of its customers, including Dean.”
Last June, Telus reported to the CRTC that 177 unsuccessful 911 calls were made by 59 Manitobans during the massive outage, which lasted from the evening of March 22 to the afternoon of March 24.
While Telus blamed the issue on “an equipment failure on the Bell facilities” and noted it “does not know the reason” for the failure, Bell countered that only Telus customers were affected. Bell claimed the outage persisted because of how Telus handled a brief, four-minute system reset on Bell’s side.
The Switzer family is seeking unspecified damages for funeral expenses and other losses under the provincial Fatal Accidents Act.
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