Police / Emergency services airwaves restored after fault
COMMUNICATION airwaves for some of the emergency services in Shetland is now fully operational again after it went down last week.
Shetland area commander Lindsay Tulloch said the services were able to use a back-up system during the flooding incidents last week, which prompted the attention of the emergency services.
“This was airwaves for Police Scotland, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and the ambulance service,” he told a meeting of Shetland’s community safety and resilience board on Thursday.
He said the problem was fixed by engineers and that “further work is ongoing to improve resilience into the future”.
The fault was discovered last Wednesday (18 November), the day of the flooding, but Tulloch said it was not weather related.
“Engineers from the mainland travelled to Shetland to discover technical faults between Bressay and Unst transmitter sites,” he said.
“We put our contingency plans into place and were able to maintain communications across services and with mainland control rooms.
“This included the deployment of a mobile airwaves mast operating from the Police Station. Repairs have been completed and full coverage has been restored.”
The Met Office, meanwhile, said a total of 51mm of rain fell at Lerwick weather station in the 24 hours on 18 November.
The November mean monthly rainfall for Lerwick is 146mm, so effectively 35 per cent of the monthly mean fell during the 24 hours.
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