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Counties left in the dark when 911 fails County first responders to FCC, cell companies: Tell us when 911 goes out
Story by Mary Ann Barton Senior Staff Writer, National Association of Counties
he Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is investigating an AT&T 911 out- age March 8 that left counties across 13 states scrambling to get the word out to residents and deal with emergencies after the company failed to no- tify local governments or its customers in a timely manner.
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FCC Chairman Ajit Pai spoke with the company’s CEO the night of the outage and said he stressed to him the “urgent need to restore service and to communicate with first responders, as well as AT&T customers, about the status of operations.”
“I’m glad to see the FCC is looking into this issue,” said Orange County, Fla., Mayor Te- resa Jacobs, who has aired her concerns in a letter to the FCC and in a conference call with the agency.
A In addition to Jacobs, officials in Colorado, Minnesota,
Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington, D.C., have also weighed in with their concerns in letters to the FCC.
When the outage hit March 8, Orange County con- tacted AT&T and scrambled to get the word out to their residents, saturating the county with alternative emergency numbers via Twitter and crawls on local TV news stations.
Te 911 outage not only put residents in danger, but tourists as well, Jacobs noted. Orange County’s population doubles when tourists hit the area looking for sun and fun and she notes it’s an “awesome responsibility” to protect them. “Tey need to know they’re arriving into a devel- oped country,” she said.
When customers called 911 March 8, a few were helped
by a backup system, but most — the FCC said 12,600 people tried to call — heard a busy signal or a ring that went unanswered across counties in California, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennes- see, Texas, Virginia and Washington, D.C. and other states.
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Tere does not appear to be a system in place to hold companies responsible for contacting local governments when an outage occurs.
Jacobs and other county officials hope to see that change.
“In addition to examining the actual malfunction of their system, I’d like to ask for a comprehensive review of AT&T’s failure to alert its customers and impacted public safety agencies in a timely fashion,” Jacobs wrote in her letter to the FCC.
Jacobs and other Orange County, Fla. officials held a
family in Orange County, suffering a medi- cal emergency, set off their home alarm after nine failed attempts at calling 911.
conference call last month with the FCC about the 911 outage, to discuss the impact it had on the county, and walked the agency through how they only found out about the outage during an emergency and not from AT&T.
A family in Orange County,
suffering a medical emergency, set off their home alarm in hopes of contacting emergency responders, after nine failed attempts at calling 911, county officials said.
“I’m not sure I would have had the presence of mind to set off that alarm,” Jacobs said.
Te home alarm company contacted the Orange Coun-
ty Fire Department, which triggered a visit from Orange County Fire & Rescue Engineer Matthew West and Lt. Jeff Kelly. West and Kelly contacted the county at about 6 p.m. to let them know that 911 service was down. At the same time, one of Jacobs’ sons, who recently became a firefighter, called her to tell her 911 service was down.
Orange County tried to contact AT&T for more infor- mation. When they weren’t able to get in touch with the carrier, they made their own announcement and contacted the media to get the word out. Local TV stations ran the county’s message, a visual crawl that contained local emer- gency phone numbers to call.
Te March 8 outage also hit the D.C. metro area. Local government officials worked to get the word out, just like
COUNTY LINES, SUMMER 2017
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