News Release -- Enhanced 911 Board
August 7, 2014
Contact:
David Tucker
Executive Director
State of Vermont
Enhanced 911 Board
802-828-2395
As reported yesterday, the statewide emergency 911 system in Vermont experienced a 40 minute outage on August 6th. During that period, callers seeking emergency assistance in Vermont were not able to reach the 911 call centers. The system failure was corrected yesterday and the system has been fully operational since the outage was resolved around 1 PM on August 6th.
The 911 system in Vermont is a fully hosted system provided by a company called Intrado, which is based in Longmont, Colorado. In a statement from Intrado regarding the reason for outage, Intrado Senior Vice President Steve Lowe said “Intrado goes to great lengths to design networks with multiple layers of redundancy. On August 6, 2014 we experienced a double equipment failure in our network. During system restoration, we discovered another error that caused the network to be temporarily unavailable. Intrado takes our responsibility to 9-1-1 very seriously and are working closely with the State of Vermont on this issue.”
Since the outage yesterday, the Enhanced 911 Board has been focusing primarily on reaching out to those individuals who attempted to call 911 during the outage. All but a few individuals have been contacted and efforts continue to reach those that were not reached yesterday. It appears that everyone who had an emergency was able to get help through their local police or other emergency responders.
David Tucker, Executive Director for the Enhanced 911 Board said “the system was designed to be fully redundant and should not have failed. We are disappointed with the performance of our technology vendor, both for the fact that the system failed and also for the time it took to get the call back numbers for those who were not able to get through to 911 during the outage”, said Tucker. “911 services are supposed to be available at all times, so an outage of this magnitude, even though the duration was short, is not what we expect from our service partners who have been entrusted to manage this system for Vermont. The Board regrets this incident and is taking all reasonable steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again, including raising this issue with the Federal Communications Commission, which is looking into this matter.”
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