Cause sought for 911 outage

By Wayne Towner
PARKERSBURG - Wood County 911 officials are investigating the cause of a Monday morning outage affected 911 service for approximately two hours, reducing the number of working lines available for emergency calls.

Randy Lowe, director of the Wood County E-911 Center, said about 6 a.m. Monday the center was informed by Verizon that possibly three of the six main 911 lines were not operable.

"Those lines could not rollover to our four backup lines," Lowe said. "Knowing the severity of the issue, we started testing on our end. We found that at times we had at least one 911 line working and at other times possibly no lines were working."

Lowe said Verizon worked to resolve the issue and at approximately 8:40 a.m. all lines were shown to be working. Verizon informed local officials the company was exploring what had happened and would attempt to put in safeguards to prevent it from happening in the future, he said. Lowe stressed that the problems involved Verizonás equipment, not the 911 center's.

"I want to take this opportunity to continue to inform the public that 911 is not an exact science," Lowe said. "It is a very complicated system that incorporates various forms of commmunication and several telephone service providers. Our own equipment, which is the latest and greatest, is susceptible to failure. Redundancies are put into place to prevent loss of service, but in this case they did not work. It is, however, amazing that a high percentage of the time, it works,ã he said.

Lowe said the public should be aware that in some cases the number of rings they hear on their end is not necessarily the same number of rings heard by dispatchers. There are also times when all dispatchers are busy on 911 calls. During such a period, someone may experience a delay in service.

There are three things to consider when dialing 911, Lowe said. The first is to make sure it is an emergency when immediate response is necessary. The second is to stay on the line, if ringing, for at least a few minutes. Finally, if no one answers after a few minutes or there is a busy signal, dial the public safety agency directly or call the center's non-emergency number 485-8501.

"We take our jobs very seriously," Lowe said. "We will continue to minimize technical issues and dispatcher error. Please be assured that over 90 percent of the 100,000 calls for service a year are being handled efficiently, but during those rare times of equipment failure be prepared to help us help you," he said.