Callaway County 911 outage still under investigation

Call center adds back up redundancies after phone system goes down Monday morning

Callaway County 911 Joint Communications is still investigating what caused its phone systems to go down Monday morning during a routine generator test. Michelle Kidwell, director of 911 Joint Communications, said they are adding more redundancies and clarifying procedures in case a similar situation should happen again.

"The main thing is working on call transferring ... to have a back up redundancy for 911 calls," Kidwell said.

The call center lost all phone lines Monday morning during its weekly generator test, Kidwell said. She added that while the center has experienced small glitches in the past, she hasn't seen a generator affect the phone system like it did this week.

"We've never had a total loss of phones quite like this," Kidwell said of Monday's incident.

When phone lines were lost, she said Joint Communications immediately flipped a switch to transfer emergency calls to Audrain County's dispatch. They then contacted Audrain's call center and gave them the appropriate cell phone numbers to contact in case a Callaway County call came in. Kidwell said that during the about four hours the phones were completely down, Audrain reported three calls to Callaway dispatch.

While all local emergency departments were contacted, Kidwell said there was some miscommunication in getting the word out to various emergency responders departments. Joint Communications contacted all appropriate departments, but in some instances, they let staff members know rather than department heads. Kidwell said Joint Communications has clarified the process for contacting emergency response teams in the event that the center loses its phone systems in the future. Its protocol specifies department heads should be contacted.

Within a couple hours of the phone system going down, Kidwell said one console was up and running. By noon, a second console was also up. At the time, she believed the other two consoles would be up soon after. However, they did not get back online until about 6 p.m.

Radio was unaffected during the entire incident.

"It was a little odd," Kidwell said.

Kidwell stressed that emergency operations were not affected. The call center employees had a busier day as only two of them were able to take incoming calls, while others worked to get information out to the appropriate emergency response department via the radio system.

"Our operations were hindered, but as for emergency calls, we were still operational," Kidwell said.

Kidwell said she is working with AT&T to ensure that call forwarding works on the Emergency Operations Center wireless phones so that if a similar issues was to occur, dispatch could forward emergency and administrative calls to those wireless phones rather than to another county's call center.

While initially Joint Communications thought a power surge caused the phone systems to go down, Kidwell said the city did not show evidence of a power surge on its end. It is possible, she added, that there could be a problem with the generator. The generator company should be out to look at the generator sometime this week.

"I will hopefully know something by Friday," Kidwell said.

If the generator cannot be looked at until next week, Kidwell said they will hold off on testing the generator on Monday, in case the test again affects phone systems.