Loading ...IT will cost $10 million to rebuild the Telstra telephone exchange, plus millions in compensation for suffering businesses and residents – but Telstra’s biggest hurdle will be rebuilding trust.
This is the message from Telstra chief executive, David Thodey who said restoration of the 100,000 damaged services would normally take two years, but Telstra will complete the same amount of work in two weeks.
Mr Thodey caught a chartered plane from Sydney to Warrnambool on Tuesday to inspect the damage first-hand and apologise for the disaster.
He told The Spectator that the last time there was a fire in an Australian exchange was 80 years ago and while the scope of the impact was still not fully understood, Telstra was working towards finding out what happened and what they could have done differently.
“I just want to say sorry because this has impacted a lot of people’s lives,” he said.
“The nature of our business is about risk management and we have big infrastructure, circuits running, power – every one of these things are points of risk.”
About 5000 customers are still without landline and ADSL service, but it is believed everything will be back online by Saturday.
Full story in today’s Spectator.
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