911 System Outage Affects 6 Western Pennsylvania Counties
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) - Six counties in the region experienced issues with 911 service on Tuesday.
Officials say the outage affected callers in Armstrong, Butler, Cambria, Indiana, Somerset and Westmoreland counties.
The outage didn't last very long, but now at least one county emergency services director wants to know why it happened and take steps to make sure it doesn't happen again.
"I hope we never have to go through this again," said Bud Mertz, Westmoreland County's director of Public Safety.
The troubles started in the morning with a massive communications glitch.
"Just before 8 o'clock, we lost operations of our 911 phone system," said Mertz.
If you were dialing 911, you weren't getting through. Because of that contingency plans went into motion at the Westmoreland County 911 Center.
"We notified all of our emergency services. We asked them to staff their stations, the police, fire, EMS stations," said Mertz.
The problem spread quickly, knocking 911 out in the six counties.
The issues came down to computer communication fail safes that failed to do their job. Two hours later, the software's vendor eventually fixed the bug.
But for Mertz, that was two hours too long.
"They've taken some other actions to recreate that redundancy a second time so this won't happen again," said Mertz. "I'm going to be on top of this, I guarantee you, to hold them to what the system is supposed to do."
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