Regional 911 outage affects Hot Springs, Garland County

Calls for city of Hot Springs emergency services were routed to the Garland County 911 Communications Center for a while Thursday morning due to an AT&T outage affecting multiple counties.

Bo Robertson, the county’s emergency management director, said the issue started at about 4:30 a.m. and affected multiple counties, including Garland, Clark, Pulaski, Lonoke, Saline, Montgomery and Polk.

“We are still able to process 911 calls and dispatch. Our 911 calls are forwarded to our landlines. We are answering all the 911 calls for city and county at the moment. We’re working with AT&T to correct that,” Robertson said.

It was his understanding it was a problem with AT&T and somewhere the AT&T line was broken, he said.

He said AT&T was working on getting the city calls forwarded to their landlines instead of the county’s.

“(The communications center) is answering a whole bunch of phone calls. About 4:30 a.m., we started taking all the 911 calls with the same amount of staffing. Hopefully AT&T can work on segregating out those phone calls and start providing a little bit of relief,” he said.

The Hot Springs Police Department was asking the public to call an alternate number after the 911 system went down Thursday morning.

“911 lines are down!! If you have an emergency please call 501-321-6789,” the city said in a post on its Facebook page.

The problem was resolved Thursday morning, according to a later post.