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End of the line? Failure of 911 system hints at need for upgrade

By ALI HELGOTH - Staff Writer
Saturday, October 11, 2008 1:27 AM PDT

ELKO - For close to an hour in July the phone lines to Elko Central Dispatch were down.

Due to an equipment failure, the system was for all practical purposes unavailable to emergency responders for 54 minutes in mid-July, prompting the recognition for the need of a more modernized system.

“I don't know how it happened, why it happened,” said Director Kristine Whipple, who took the position in March after working for 10 years in dispatch centers in Las Vegas.

She said she asked Frontier Communications, but was never given a response.

According to Frontier spokeswoman Stephanie Beasley, the failure happened in a fiber card in a redundant ring that is supposed to re-route the call when it fails. It didn't perform that function, which led to the line being down.

“It is something we actively work on improving,” Beasley said. “That we never have any customers, and especially any public safety go down. As soon as we find out we have alarm systems go off, we make sure we get it up and running as soon as possible.”

Beasley said Frontier's record indicates there were no 911 calls in the 54 minutes.

At the time, there was no emergency backup plan in place, so dispatchers used personal cell phones to call Whipple, the police chief, fire chief, ambulance director and other emergency responders while phone lines were dead.

“It was a very stressful situation,” Whipple said, later adding, “Now we need to move on and find a solution for it.”

A backup plan has been discussed, but it is not yet in practice. Prior to the July incident, the last time a failure impacted 911 lines was four years ago, Beasley said.

Plans call for a mirror location, with phone lines for dispatch to answer 911 calls and radios to allow dispatchers to communicate with the various agencies for which they take calls.

If a line is cut, calls could be routed to the other location with a flip of a switch.

The transition wouldn't be instantaneous though. There's still a chance a call could be missed.

Usually there are two dispatchers on duty, so one of the dispatchers would drive to the alternate location to take calls.

For that to happen, though, another location would need to be secured and dispatch would have to purchase additional radios, Whipple said.

Beasley said Frontier has proposed an enhanced 911 system to the county. That would allow for the central dispatch center to receive the automatic number identification and automatic location identification.

If a caller is cut off, the system registers the number and location instantaneously.

A call to 911 would go through a dedicated Public Safety Answering Point trunk, which sends it to Reno where the AT&T selective router picks up ANI and ALI and determines where the call comes from and reroutes it to Elko County. Elko County central dispatch picks it up and sends it to the appropriate agency.

According to Beasley, the county would also have to construct a master street address guide for the system. In the meantime, Frontier has provided the county with a pseudo version of the address guide as the county looks further into the situation.

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