Lightning strike causes interruptions to Australian national emergency services number

CANBERRA, May 4 (Xinhua) -- A lightning strike in rural Australia has been blamed for cutting a cable that caused a major emergency services number outage in every state.

The cable between Orange and Bowral in rural New South Wales (NSW) was cut in the early hours of Friday morning, causing intermittent interruptions to emergency calls for customers of Telstra, the nation's largest telecommunications company, in NSW, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania.

Telstra posted a photo of the cable pit on social media on Friday, saying it had "significant fire damage consistent with lightning strike."

Disruptions to 000, the national phone number for emergency services, were first reported in South Australia before surfacing in the other five states.

"People were taking to a 000 operator and when the calls were being transferred to the communications center, that's when it disconnected," Norm Buckley, Fire and Rescue NSW Superintendent, told reporters on Friday.

"We were aware that a call was coming through but it wasn't being transferred through."

Mark Walton, NSW Police Assistant Commissioner, said that there were procedures in place to deal with such outages.

"Under our emergency management here, if we have disasters or other emergencies, we're well-practised, we plan, prepare, and are able to respond. This is a contingency where we've had difficulty with our communications," he said at a press conference.

"We've moved to other arrangements - the Police Assistance Line picking up the 000 calls that can't get through. The police have been able to rapidly ensure we have enough staff to handle those calls, and divert and dispatch calls for assistance to all the agencies."

Telstra has apologized for the outage, saying they are "working closely with emergency services" to resolve any further problems. Enditem