Telkom services resume after fire cut off region
What you need to know:
- Internet and phone lines that had been off for about six hours now fixed
Internet and wireless services to Western Kenya that were earlier disrupted by a fire at Telkom Kenya regional office have been restored.
The services resumed after six hours during which the western region was left in a near isolation from the rest of the country.
Coming back
Only the cable services have yet to be restored but the firm’s public relations officer Mr Khalid Salim says would be up “soon”.
“We have since revived the services and traffic is coming back albeit slowly,” said Mr Salim.
“Work is on progress and by the end of the day, we want our customers to enjoy normal services,” he added.
The official said the firm had incurred huge losses due to the fire.
“We also take this time to reach out to our customers who have incurred enormous losses to be patient with us because normalcy is being restored,” he said.
An early morning fire on Monday that lasted about three hours gutted down a vital transmitter at the firm’s Kisumu regional office.
As a result of the 6am fire, the entire Western region was thrown into a communication blackout.
The universal media gateway, the nucleus for directing flow of communication was seriously destroyed in the fire that started at six in the morning, effectively paralysing communication in the region.
Pungent fumes
Apart from fixed line and wireless services, Internet services were also disrupted leaving the region isolated from the rest of the country.
The municipal fire brigade took about three hours to put off the fire but by then the vital universal media gateway system had been affected.
Pungent fumes of burning equipment filled the air giving the fire brigade and staff of the giant telecommunications a hard time as they battled to put out the fire.
The cause of the fire that affected two cabinets that contain the gateway was still unknown but officials said it could have been as a result of an electric fault.
Engineers at the firm were quickly deployed to the site as the management made frantic efforts to restore services.
