Following statewide phone network outages overnight Thursday, 911 services, for the most part, were restored to Clark County by Friday morning, though Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency was still receiving intermittent reports of some emergency call failures.
The system appeared to be operating properly as of Friday afternoon. Radio traffic monitored at The Columbian chirped with information about police conducting premise checks, injuries caused by falls and vehicle prowlers.
The local outage was part of a nationwide outage, which originated with telecommunications provider CenturyLink, and also left many customers without internet. The outage began early in the day but by late Thursday night, the Monroe, La.-based company tweeted that its engineers had identified a “network element” that was affecting services and expected to fully restore services within hours.
Emergency services across Washington were affected due to the problem. A news release from the Yakima Valley Office of Emergency Management on Thursday evening informed residents there of 911 alternatives. Cowlitz County Emergency Management did the same.
Instead of dialing 911, CRESA asked callers with emergencies to dial 360-693-3111. The county’s 311 nonemergency service appeared to be unaffected, the agency said, and its 911 text message service also still functioned.
CenturyLink didn’t provide details of the problem and didn’t indicate how many customers were affected. Customers from New York to California reported outages.
Federal officials and Washington regulators said Friday they’ve started an investigation into the outage. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai called the outage “completely unacceptable” because people who need help couldn’t use the 911 emergency number.
“Its breadth and duration are particularly troubling,” he said.
The commission’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau will investigate the cause and impact of the outage, he said.
“We will be working with (state officials) and others as they work with CenturyLink to determine the cause of the outage and what steps can be taken to mitigate this type of outage in the future,” CRESA said in a news release.
CRESA Public Information Officer Eric Frank said the agency is still looking into whether emergency responses were delayed due to the outage. The center typically receives about 1,200 calls per day.
Frank said the dispatch center received about 800 calls overnight through its backup lines. Some of the calls were the result of alerts sent out to cellphones.
“We had a number of calls from people who were confused. Either they misread the message, or they saw the number and thought they were supposed to call,” Frank said.
For dispatchers working the phones and monitoring multi-tiered computer screens, not much changed on the job — other than relying more on information sent through text messages.
Late-night warning
After the outage became apparent, CRESA sent out alerts to multiple platforms. The Clark County-based 911 center issued an alert shortly before 11:30 p.m., and it went out to phones in the Portland metro area, including Multnomah, Clackamas, Washington and Columbia counties.
Oregon media outlets reported that the outages did not affect emergency services there, however. They also characterized the late-night alerts as cryptic and startling, and some indicated they were unfamiliar with CRESA.
The alerts also elicited unfavorable tweets, particularly in response to CRESA’s apology: “Got woken up by a phone call first, no caller ID. Had to listen to voice message to see who it was. Then an alert message that I could not silence. Then another call. Then another alert. Finally turned my phone off so I could get some sleep,” responded Twitter user @homeduc8tr.
The agency said it has identified issues to ensure that future alerts will not be sent out multiple times.
Eighty percent of calls coming into the dispatch center originate from cellphones. CRESA said it decided to send a message via an emergency alert system and texts after hearing from responders in the field that people were confused about the outage and how to reach 911.
“Because of the shared media market with the Portland metro region, everyone got these notifications. While we can somewhat tailor the range of these alerts, due to our close proximity to Oregon, there was some bleed over into that area,” CRESA said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
