WICHITA, Kan. (KAKE) - The state's backup system for 911 centers isn't much help for Sedgwick County. It wasn't working during a two-hour outage early Sunday morning.
Sedgwick County's 911 system went down around 12:30 a.m. Sunday and operators didn't discover the outage until a couple hours later.
The Sedgwick County Emergency Communications Director Elora Forshee said, "We were receiving calls through even 2:30 in the morning, but it was about that time we got a call from one of our hospital partners that said, 'Hey we've been trying to call you on 911, we're not getting through.' They immediately started doing test calls from a dispatch they were not getting through."
Forshee said there appears to have been a glitch that stopped some of the calls. Normally when the system goes down, Sedgwick County's calls would get shunted to Shawnee County, the only other county with enough operators to handle Sedgwick County's call load. But in this case, their system was down too.
Sedgwick County Commissioner Pete Meitzner said," I think we got some more work due on enhanced 911, because that's not really the way that it was raised to me, at least in my mind. I thought that we had a system where if we went down someone else would take over. It doesn't sound like that's a solution."
The Kansas 911 Coordinating Council has approved spending $600,000 to add another layer of redundancy to the system to make it easier for Shawnee County to pick up Sedgwick County's calls, or vice versa. But that wouldn't have helped in this case.
Forshee says the county is not actually a direct customer of AT&T, the 911 coordinating council is AT&T's customer and the county is contracted with the council.
The county is still waiting on the engineering report from AT&T to figure out exactly how the company's maintenance work cause this weekend's problems. We'll continue to track this and bring more information as it becomes available.