The local 911 dispatch system went down for several hours in the early hours of March 3.
The outage was due to maintenance on a fiber optic line that apparently caused a multi-county outage for cell coverage, affecting the 911 dispatch system from about 12:30-3 a.m. on March 3, according to multiple local officials.
A reader contacted The Electric on March 3 and said that he was trying to call 911 around 1:30 a.m. from both a landline and a cell phone about an issue requiring a police response.
He said he just got a busy signal when he dialed 911 and there was no answer on the non-emergency line for the sheriff’s office.
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The reader called the Montana Highway Patrol in an effort to connect to any law enforcement officer, but they were also unable to get through, getting a busy signal. The trooper told the reader that he’d radio the Cascade County Sheriff’s Office or Great Falls Police Department for assistance.
The reader said that GFPD officer did respond once contact was made and took a report.
Lt. Matt Fleming, GFPD spokesman, said that Lumen Technologies/CenturyLink had planned maintenance on a fiber optic line on Feb. 26.
He said Lumen had notified the city and 911 dispatch center of that planned maintenance and there was a plan to patch the line and route 911 calls to a non-emergency number that’s a landline. The company was supposed to do a test call once the patch was in place, Fleming said.
According to the dispatch center, the test call never came in and they assumed that the maintenance had been successfully completed.
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Fleming said the maintenance activity had been rescheduled to March 3, unbeknownst to the dispatch center and local law enforcement.
Lumen did call the dispatch center shortly before the maintenance work, but at that point, staff weren’t prepared to implement the backup plan since they’d been told the maintenance was being done the week before, Fleming said.
In the early hours of March 3, the patch apparently failed and they don’t have a good way to know whether calls were routed the non-emergency number, which also doesn’t record calls or gather data the way the standard 911 dispatch system does, Fleming said.
GFPD and the 911 dispatch center have contingency plans for known outages to the local communication system, but in the March 3, they didn’t have notice to put those plans in place.
Flaming said that due to the outage, the text to 911 option and RapidSOS systems were also offline.
“It’s pretty spooky,” Fleming said to have 911 go offline for any length of time.
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City officials said other communication providers, such as AT&T and Verizon, also experienced outages.
In an emailed statement, a CenturyLink spokesperson wrote, “CenturyLink conducted system maintenance on March 3. Prior to the start of this activity, CenturyLink arranged to reroute its customers’ 911 traffic to the Great Falls, MT Public Safety Answering Point’s designated local administrative lines. This action was taken in advance of the maintenance to ensure continuity of service and to prevent any impact to CenturyLink customers attempting to reach 911 during the maintenance period. Any 911 calls placed over CenturyLink facilities during this time were rerouted as planned, though other local service providers may have experienced service impacts during this timeframe as they operate independently. CenturyLink is committed to reliable connectivity and actively coordinated with the Great Falls PSAP during the entirety of the maintenance.”
Local law enforcement typically doesn’t have redundant communication systems, Fleming said, and the implementations costs are high.
Fleming said the city had several open tickets with Lumen as of March 4 seeking additional information about the outage.
Lt. Col. Tom Figarelle, spokesman for the Montana National Guard, said that the 120th Airlift Wing also experiences a communication outage on March 3.
He said that the 120th called their communications team around 2:15 a.m. to report to base to restore communications.
The airmen had the system back up within about two hours, Figarelle said, but the Guard has a series of redundancies and emergency plans, so they were never without the ability to communicate.
A spokesman for the 341st Missile Wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base said they were notified of the outage by the Cascade County Sheriff’s Office.
He said 911 calls normally go through the local dispatch center and are directed to the base. If that capability is down, direct calls to the Malmstrom Fire Department, Security Forces or the Command Post are viable alternatives.
