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Cause of Tuesday’s 911 system breakdown still unknown — VIDEO

The Metropolitan Police Department hasn’t determined what caused an hourslong outage of 911 services Tuesday, and police are beefing up their monitoring protocols and on-hand technical staffing in case it happens again.

The system went down about 3:30 p.m. and stayed down until about 10 p.m. Calls were rerouted to North Las Vegas and Henderson police departments, but Metro estimated that people who called 911 received a busy signal for 30 to 50 minutes before those calls were diverted.

The outage affected all calls within Metro’s jurisdiction, including calls for ambulances or firefighters. Nonemergency calls made to 311 were not taken at all during the outage.

Assistant Sheriff Tom Roberts briefed reporters Wednesday afternoon at Metro headquarters on Martin Luther King Boulevard. He said the department was still working to figure out exactly how many calls were missed. Metro documented 1,326 calls for service Monday during the same period, between 3:30 and 10 p.m., according to dispatch logs.

Roberts said there weren’t any deaths or exacerbated injuries, to his knowledge, as a result of the outage.

“We realize the 911 system is a lifeline for our community, and when someone calls there’s an expectation that someone will be on the other end to answer that call for help,” he said. “Yesterday’s unfortunate event is not representative of the kind of service that we want to provide and is definitely not what the public deserves, and for that I’d like to apologize to the community.”

Roberts said the department received numerous complaints about the outage and the time callers spent on hold. The industry standard is to answer emergency calls within 10 seconds 90 percent of the time.

“There were some very unhappy citizens,” he said.

Metro’s new, $2.3 million Internet-based communications platform included an early-warning system that allowed the department to quickly transfer calls — and dispatchers — to the other jurisdictions while workers “methodically” went through the system to figure out the problem, Roberts said.

The department signed a 10-year contract with the company Airbus DS Communications in the summer after 911 systems went down on June 28 for more than six hours. More than 400 people who dialed 911 were met with a busy signal during that outage, which Roberts said happened because the old technology just gave out. The contract includes upgrades and maintenance.

Sixty percent of U.S. 911 calls are handled by Airbus, and the company has contracts in two-thirds of the country’s major metropolitan areas, Roberts said.

As of Wednesday, computer hackers had been ruled out as a cause of the crash. Roberts said the new system includes offsite monitoring of the system’s firewalls and they were not compromised. And the problem was not within the communication center’s Century Link service but within the Airbus system itself.

Metro began to set up a backup communications center, said to be housed in the southwest valley’s Enterprise Area Command station, in December. That second station should be operational in March or April, and the department is looking at hiring 20 more dispatchers, Roberts said.

“This will hopefully not happen again,” he said.

This isn’t the first time that Metro has had problems with its communications subcontractors in recent years.

Metro filed a lawsuit against Harris Corp. in September 2013 to recoup the $42 million the agency lost on a failed radio system. Department lawyers cited fraud and breach of contract due to dropped calls and dead zones. Metro settled that lawsuit in November for $7.15 million. The department finished implementing a $57.4-million, 11-year deal for a digital Motorola system in March.

Contact Wesley Juhl at wjuhl@reviewjournal.com and 702-383-0391. Find him on Twitter: @WesJuhl

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