CINCINNATI — For 40 minutes on Saturday, 27 different people called 911 and had their calls unanswered thanks to a power surge that created complicated issues within the Hamilton County 911 Communications Center.
Andrew Knapp, director of the Hamilton County Communications Center, spoke to Hamilton County commissioners on Thursday about the outage and what led up to it.
Knapp said the center experienced an electrical surge that cause a power outage lasting just three seconds, though officials with Duke Energy who came to investigate could not find where the surge originated. It had to be close to the 911 center, Knapp said, because staff reported a flash and dimming lights inside their building.
The center never fully lost power, thanks to backup and remediation protocols in place, but it did cause a greater technological issue that led to the center's phones going offline for a total of 40 minutes that day, Knapp said.
He explained that when the surge happened, systems in the 911 center reverted to their battery-powered backups, as they are intended to do. But a key component within the system was damaged, which stopped the system from reverting back from the battery backup when the power issues were resolved, Knapp said.
Because of that, the system remained on its battery backup, which depleted over time.
This was not a previously known issue within the system, so staff believed that the 911 center's system was still routing calls during the power outage and subsequent maintenance — but they weren't. In those 40 minutes, the center missed 27 unique callers, Knapp said.
"We consider this completely and totally unacceptable," said Knapp.
However, none of the calls missed were serious in nature, Knapp said, and all callers were subsequently contacted by 911 center staff to connect them with emergency services as quickly as possible.
He praised staff working in the center on Saturday and said a 24-year veteran serving as the center's on-duty supervisor at the time was instrumental in identifying the call routing issue and working to fix it as quickly as possible. Knapp said the center was fully staffed when the outage happened, and additional managers were called in to assist as well.
Knapp said they are still trying to identify the root cause of the service outage to help improve their plans for emergencies like this in the future, but as of Thursday the source of the surge and the reason the systems remained using their battery backups long after power was stable in the building are still unknown, Knapp said.
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