AT&T power loss cuts 911 services

All of state hit; shifting calls saves day

Early Thursday, 911 services went down for all law enforcement agencies in the state.

According to authorities, an AT&T main processing center lost power, causing the outage and forcing agencies to forward 911 calls to other lines.

Pulaski County sheriff’s office spokesman Lt. Cody Burk said that the blackout happened just after 3 a.m.

“There was a main processing center that went down that locked everyone down throughout the state,” Burk said. “Once they got the main hub back up, they had to go department to department through the computers to get them back online.”

Agencies in Pulaski County were among the first to get service back, according to Burk and other spokespeople. At 9:30 a.m., 911 services were restored to the rural parts of the county.

Shortly after the loss of 911 coverage, the sheriff’s office reached out to AT&T to reroute calls to nonemergency numbers.

The reroute, according to Burk, did not have any effect on the volume of calls to the department.

“We contacted AT&T, which is our service pro

vider for 911 and had them to reroute the 911 calls over to our nonemergency line,” Burk said. “By doing that, we got the call and got to talk to people, but we missed out on a lot of the data.”

According to Burk, nothing “tragic” happened as a result of the service failure.

In North Little Rock, 911 services were out until 12:45 p.m., according to a city release.

Spokeswoman Sgt. Carmen Helton said the Police Department rerouted calls to the communications center.

“That number rolls over to comms center at 4 o’clock because, if someone calls, the building’s not open after 4 o’clock,” Helton said. “What they did was they used it all day. They just changed it so that it went all day.”

According to spokesman Sgt. Eric Barnes, the Little Rock Police Department was out of 911 service until just after 3 p.m.

Barnes said Little Rock calls also were rerouted to another line shortly after the shutdown, but that shift did not cause a huge logjam compared with the usual call traffic.

“The 911 calls and the nonemergency calls, which we ended up having to reroute to, they’re answered by the same people,” Barnes said. “So we just answered them just as usual. We had a pretty quick rerouting process at the beginning of the day so it kind of resolved some problems for us.”

According to Barnes, because of how shortly after 911 was restored, a tally of the calls was not available.

Other departments also were unable to provide an exact call tally for the blackout period on Thursday because of the data lost during that time.