Brandon’s mayor says Manitoba’s emergency service needs to have “redundancy built in,” after an outage at the city’s 911 dispatch centre knocked out the service for hours across most of Manitoba Wednesday afternoon.

Bell said in a statement sent at 4:13 p.m. that 911 service had been successfully restored following a third-party fibre cable cut that interrupted it everywhere in Manitoba except Winnipeg earlier in the day.

The Brandon 911 emergency dispatch centre is one of the two primary centres in Manitoba. The other is in Winnipeg, which was not affected by the outage.

The Brandon dispatch centre provides 911 service to the southwestern Manitoba city, as well as communities across Manitoba outside of Winnipeg, serving police agencies and fire departments in rural areas across Manitoba.

Brandon Mayor Jeff Fawcett said the 911 interruption is a serious concern, and he expects it will trigger steps to keep it from happening again.

The dispatch centre outage “knocked down the integrity of the system,” he said. “There has to be redundancy built in.”

Steinbach Mayor Earl Funk also said it’s concerning the 911 system could be disrupted by the outage at one dispatch centre, leaving rural communities across Manitoba vulnerable.

The service is “important to the well-being of every Manitoban,” he said.

“I would totally imagine that there would be redundancy built into the service so that there would be a backup, that there would be a way of still getting the emergency calls in.”

Brandon police first warned the public about the service disruption in a social media post shortly after 1 p.m.

They advised residents who needed help to call their local 10-digit police non-emergency line as efforts were being made to restore 911 service.

Manitoba’s Emergency Management Organization issued an emergency alert about the outage around 2:45 p.m.

The emergency alert was sent to television, radio and wireless devices, a provincial spokesperson said.