MANILLA has been lucky to avoid a serious emergency in the midst of the town’s ongoing mobile phone disruptions.
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The State Emergency Service (SES) Manilla unit controller Vicki Blinman told The Leader works to Telstra’s mobile service has “thrown a spanner in the works” for local services who have come to rely on their mobile phones.
Ms Blinman said “luckily” the Manilla branch had no emergency call-outs in the region during the phone outages, which have been carrying on for two weeks.
The SES usually relies on text messages to assemble their teams during emergencies.
“We’ve been pretty lucky,” she said. “I was talking to someone from the NSW Fire Brigade and they also rely on mobiles.”
While the mobile blackout could have been disastrous for services trying to respond to an emergency, Ms Blinman said the most frustrating aspect of the saga was having no warning the outages were coming.