Focusing on fuel system upgrades
To enable continuity of services as required by federal regulation, TELUS must provide its own back-up electrical power in the event that commercial electricity sources are not available. In addition, TELUS has certain remote sites where commercially provided power is not currently available. This requires the use and storage of diesel and propane fuel for continuous power generation, with diesel fuel posing an environmental risk if it leaks from either a storage tank or faulty fuel line as occurred at our Baie-des-Loups radio relay site in January 2011. Please refer to Contaminated Sites for a detailed description of the incident.
We continue to focus on fuel system upgrades as installation and maintenance of these systems helps to mitigate the future risk of environmentally damaging spills. These upgrades include the installation of double-walled fuel storage tanks and remote spill monitoring systems, which alert our emergency operations centre in the case of a fuel spill. Also included with our reported upgrades are fuel system removals, where we have determined a fuel system is no longer required at a specific location due to changing operational needs.
Since the start of our formal fuel systems upgrade program in 2002, we have completed upgrades at 241 of our sites that have tanks larger than 2,500 litres. Our target for 2011 was to complete 15 sites. We completed a total of 13 
sites in 2011, due to the re-direction of funding toward related power system decommissioning projects.
Our target for 2012 is to complete 15 sites.