BT Exchange Fire Disrupts Services for Tens of Thousands in Derby UK

A serious fire at BT’s main telephone exchange in central Derby (Colyear Street) has left tens of thousands of customers without a working phone line across parts of both Derbyshire and Staffordshire in England.

The first floor fire, which started at 3:30am this morning, was quickly extinguished by local fire crews. But unfortunately the event has also left significant damage behind and this in turn affected related telecoms and Internet services for thousands of customers in the region.

The Derby exchange, which despite appearances is actually fairly modern and even supports the latest Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP) based broadband connections, serves around 32,000 local homes and 4,000 businesses.

A BTOpenreach Spokesman said (here):

“Some households and businesses in the Derby area saw a loss of telephone services this morning following a fire at one of our exchanges. A large number of those customers affected have already seen their telephone service restored and we expect the remainder to be back up and running shortly. We apologise for any inconvenience.”

BT’s consumer division has also tweeted to confirm that the operator “restored service to most customers in Derby who were affected by the exchange fire earlier. Sorry again, we’ll fix the rest asap“. Happily nobody was in the building at the time and local Police are not treating the fire as suspicious.