Light pole installation in Mo. knocks out 911 in 3 states

Workers installing a light pole in Missouri cut into a fiber line, knocking out 911 service for emergency agencies in Nebraska, Nevada and South Dakota, an official with the company that operates the line said Thursday.

In Kansas City, Mo., workers installing a light pole for another company Wednesday cut into a Lumen Technologies fiber line, Lumen global issues director Mark Molzen said in an email to The Associated Press. Service was restored within 2½ hours, he said.

There were no reports of 911 outages in Kansas City.

Meanwhile, the difficulties some cellphone callers experienced making 911 calls in Del Rio, Texas, were apparently because of an outage involving a cellular carrier, not the city’s 911 system, city spokesman Peter Ojeda said. Lumen is not a 911 service provider for Texas.

Federal officials were looking into the outage.

“When you call 911 in an emergency, it is vital that call goes through. The FCC has already begun investigating the 911 multi-state outages that occurred last night to get to the bottom of the cause and impact,” Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement.

The outages created confusion for some people trying to reach emergency agencies.

In Douglas County, home to Omaha and more than a quarter of Nebraska’s residents, officials first learned there was a problem when calls from certain cellphone companies showed up in a system that maps calls but didn’t go through over the phone.

Operators started calling back anyone whose call didn’t go through, and officials reached out to Lumen, which confirmed the outage. Service was restored by 4 a.m.

Kyle Kramer, the technical manager for Douglas County’s 911 Center, said the outage highlights the potential problems of having so many calls go over the same network.

“As things become more interconnected in our modern world, whether you’re on a wireless device or a landline now, those are no longer going over the traditional old copper phone wires that may have different paths in different areas,” Kramer said. “Large networks usually have some aggregation point, and those aggregation points can be a high risk.”

Kramer said this incident and the two previous 911 outages he has seen in the past year in Omaha make him concerned that communications companies aren’t building enough redundancy into their networks. “I would hope that all of the telcos would put as much effort as possible into making sure they do diversify as much as they can to try and avoid this,” Kramer said.

Officials in Sioux Falls, S.D., said during a news conference Thursday the outage was unprecedented.

“To our knowledge, we have never experienced an outage of this magnitude or duration,” Assistant Fire Chief Mike Gramlick said.

The outages occurred in the midst of National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week.