[V]ermont officials are investigating a 45-minute outage of the state’s 911 system earlier this month, which led to nearly a dozen failed emergency calls.
The outage on March 19 was caused by human error while crews from Consolidated Communications were working on the public switch telephone network, a system that carries phone traffic, according to Barb Neal, executive director of Vermont’s E-911 Board.
The 911 system was down between 11:02 p.m. and 11:47 p.m. and caused 11 emergency calls to fail, Neal said. She said she’s not aware of any serious damage that resulted from the calls not going through and added that public safety workers attempted to reach the callers.
“In some cases the callers had found emergency responders or contacted emergency responders in another manner,” she said.
The state, through the Public Utility Commission, is now investigating the March 19 failure in tandem with a failure on Jan. 5, 2016, when an incident in the public switch network caused 911 calls to route incorrectly, according to Neal.
“Any time that a 911 caller can’t get through to a 911 call taker that is a cause for concern for me and the board,” she said. “We want to understand what needs to happen to minimize the risk for future occurrences.”
The state saw two other 911 system failures in the summer of 2016 when calls didn’t go through due to a software coding issue that has since been resolved.
At the time the Fairpoint Communications was operating the state’s 911 system — Consolidated Communications acquired the company in 2017.
