Vermont’s Enhanced 911 system went down for about 45 minutes on Monday, and the text-to-911 functionality remains turned off.
Barb Neal, the executive director of the Enhanced 911 Board, said if Vermonters try to text message to the number 911, “they will get a bounceback message that advises them that the service is not available and instructs them to make a voice call to 911.”
Neal said the board is working with FairPoint Communications to determine the root cause of the voice outage and what the next steps will be. The board wrote in a news release that Monday’s outage was related to the text-to-911 system.
During the Monday outage, Neal said the board missed seven calls and has followed up with as many of those people as possible. Two were from cellphones that can only call 911, so the board couldn’t call the people back, she said, and the board left multiple messages for a third person.
The board was able to reach the remaining four people who called, Neal said. Those people either accidentally dialed 911 or had an emergency and were able to reach first responders in another way, she said.
This is the second 911 outage of the summer. On June 22, the system went down for about a half an hour and affected 44 callers. The board has since determined that a software coding issue caused that outage.
FairPoint took over Vermont’s 911 system from a previous contractor, Intrado, on July 31, 2015. The company has an $11.2 million contract to run the system for five years.
