The Globe and Mail reports in its Wednesday edition that BCE's Bell Aliant says a widespread outage of its East Coast telco network this month was the result of a "perfect storm" involving construction crews not checking where to dig. A Canadian Press dispatch to The Globe says that the Aug. 4 breakdown affected emergency services in many parts of the region, caused widespread cellular outages on Bell, Telus, Virgin and Koodo and also interrupted Internet and some landline services for about four hours. Bell spokesman Nathan Gibson says the first cut was by a highway construction crew near Drummondville, Que. He says service was not affected in any significant way because of redundancy in the network until a second major cut near Richibucto, N.B., by a logging company in a forest. He says the second cut was difficult to access and took some time to locate precisely and the site's inaccessibility slowed the arrival of heavy equipment and repair crews. Mr. Gibson said in a statement that the armoured cables are deeply buried, but cuts can occur when third parties using backhoes do not properly follow Bell's location guides "or simply go ahead with their work without asking" for locations.