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Nearly 350 calls made during 911 outage in Boone County, 59 were for emergencies

COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ) 

Boone County Joint Communications says it received nearly 350 calls during a phone outage on Monday night and Tuesday morning, but all emergency services were dispatched efficiently. 

BCJC stopped receiving 911 calls around 6:40 pm Monday night. An alert was sent to the public just before 8 p.m., reporting that Brightspeed believed a fiber cut in Jefferson City was responsible for the outage. Boone County experienced a similar issue in May when a fiber line cut limited 911 and 311 calls for several hours. 

“After talking to Jeff City earlier today, they felt that we worked much better this time and we were able to work out some of the issues that we had last time,” Boone County Director of Communications Christie Davis said.

Brightspeed confirmed the damaged line in a statement.

"Unfortunately, during the installation of utility lines, another service provider inadvertently damaged our fiber lines. We worked quickly to repair the damage and can report that all services were restored by 8:48am CT," the statement says.

Boone County has several backup systems in place in case of emergencies like this, which allows it to dispatch emergency services in a timely manner. These include a backup call center in Boone County, which also experienced an outage Monday, and rerouting calls to a backup Public Safety Answering Point and the Jefferson City Police Department. During Monday’s outage, 911 calls were rerouted to Jefferson City. 

“[Davis] quickly got dispatchers on the road to Jefferson City to start being able to answer and dispatch those calls for that period of time,” Boone County Presiding Commissioner Kip Kendrick said. “Jeff City was able to take that on but we wanted our own dispatchers there who know the public safety personnel and protocols within Boone County.” 

BCJC also sent out an alert encouraging the public to call 311 and 573-442-6131 to report emergencies and take the stress off Jefferson City dispatchers. 

“It's not that those 911 calls were not being answered or couldn't be answered at the Jeff City location with our dispatchers there. But, we knew that if there were some type of serious event with many 911 calls coming in at once, if we could encourage those 311 calls to come into our center here in Boone County, then that would just be another way to back up and help alleviate some of that pressure that was being placed on the Jefferson City location,” Kendrick said. 

Boone County received 348 calls during the outage. Of those calls, 59 were 911 calls that were received after 9 a.m. when calls were being rerouted back to BCJC and 289 were administrative calls. The Jefferson City Police Department says it could be a week before they can compile the number of calls it received during that period. 

“We were still fully functional here in joint communications. The only thing that we didn't have were the normal calls coming in,” Davis said. “We dispatched people there so that we could help take on that call volume coming in for their center because they are scheduling their shifts based on their needs for their city so we wanted to make sure that we were able to offset that additional incoming call volume. But here at joint communications, we operated as normal.” 

BCJC also has additional backup locations in Cole County if its backup location and Jefferson City can’t handle them. Plans for emergencies like this are put in place well in advance. 

“One of the things that could happen is our radio systems go down and that immediately impacts our ability to communicate with our first responders in the field,” Davis said. 

“We try to have as many redundancies in place and plan for that as well.  Not only do we have our backup center, but our support building has immediate access for us to be able to communicate with first responders there until someone can get to our backup center if we had to completely evacuate Joint Communications.” 

Kendrick said planning discussions happen throughout the year with the county’s technical advisory committee. 

“We had literally met with Director Davis earlier in the day just to talk about additional redundancies that we're looking at,” Kendrick said. “We're in communications with other Internet service providers on what additional lines being run to the joint communication center would cost. We know that would be a costly endeavor because there really are no other fiber lines that are that are close to it.”

Article Topic Follows: Columbia

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Mitchell Kaminski

Mitchell Kaminski is from Wheaton, Illinois. He earned a degree in sports communication and journalism from Bradley University. He has done radio play-by-play and co-hosts a Chicago White Sox podcast.

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