911 callers in Sedgwick County got recording instead of live voice during outage
Sedgwick County says an outage left 9-1-1 callers hearing a recording instead of talking to a live dispatcher on Saturday.
“Currently, the length of time that 9-1-1 calls were not getting through to our phone system is unknown,” the county said in a news release.
Officials blamed the outage on AT&T “doing work on the state system last night which impacted incoming calls,” according to the release. The work also impacted Shawnee County emergency communications, the release says.
Originally, both counties “were told their operations would not be impacted due to redundant circuits serving both 9-1-1 centers,” the release says.
But apparently that didn’t end up being the case.
The county says it received a call on its administrative line about the issue, and when emergency communications staff conducted some tests, they discovered “people were getting recordings when calling 9-1-1 and were not getting through.”
Sedgwick County Emergency Communications Director Elora Forshee is attempting to obtain more information about the outage from AT&T and other entities, the release says.
The county didn’t say when it was notified about the issue.
It’s unclear how many callers were affected.
“Nothing came through to our system so we have no way to track that,” Forshee told The Eagle on Monday morning.
It’s also unknown whether people sending text messages to 9-1-1 were able to get through, Forshee said. Dispatchers didn’t receive any texts during the outage time, “but that is not unusual, when the system is working,” she said, because the lion’s share of 9-1-1 contacts still come by phone call.
Emergency Communications only receive about 90 texts from people contacting 9-1-1 a month, she said — or around three a day.
“Going forward we will proactively move calls to our internal backup system through the duration of these AT&T maintenance periods,” the release says.
“We will provide an update when we know more about why this occurred, and any other details of this outage.”
This story was originally published July 25, 2021 at 3:09 PM.
