Telephone Exchange fire in Hemsworth West Yorkshire

Openreach experienced an incident late last night (21st March 2021), in West Yorkshire, with a fire causing extensive damage to the telephone exchange, Hemsworth ATE on Westfield Road in Hemsworth.

This has impacted their services, affecting telephony and copper broadband end customers as well as some EAD end customers. 

The fire has been extinguished by the fire service and the police have closed off the site pending investigation. The building fabric has suffered significant damage but has been declared safe. 

Openreach Emergency Response Team ( ERT ) is on site and their power teams are creating a plan of restoration. However, due to the ongoing investigation by the emergency services and the nature of the incident, they have not been able to establish the full extent of the damage and all of the customer impacts.

They will be looking to resolve the situation and get customers back in service as soon as possible, but at this stage they cannot give a full restoration timescale.