Vermont’s E911 System Outage Exposes Big Operational Flaws
Vermont's statewide E911 system experienced a major outage the day after Thanksgiving. American Spirit / Shutterstock.com
A technical problem caused a major six-hour outage last week. But a lack of response protocols could have made the failure even worse.
Here’s a good reminder for state and local governments to doublecheck their operational backup plans for holidays, weekends and other times outside of traditional working hours when critical problems might unexpectedly pop up: Vermont’s statewide enhanced 911 dispatching system was offline for six hours the day after Thanksgiving because of a weather-related problem involving not just an important fiber optic line but also a failure with the back-up system.
Fortunately, there were no reported “bad outcomes” from Vermont’s recent E911 failure.
But the agency that runs the E911 system wasn’t able to react quickly and had trouble alerting regional operators about the problems, shining a light on “a critical need to develop a better way to alert state emergency officials when the system goes down as well as a back-up system,” Aki Soga, the editorial page editor of the Burlington Free Press, wrote in a weekend op-ed.
For starters, although a Colorado company that helps maintain the E911 platform sent emails to key Vermont E911 personnel about the outage, few were checking their work email the Friday after Thanksgiving. Additionally, as Soga points out, there was “no provision for contacting dispatch centers using cell phones or text” and no standard protocol to follow when phone lines aren’t functioning.
According to Vermont Public Radio, state officials also did not have easy access to the full list of phone numbers that tried to call 911 during the outage. It took until the Monday after Thanksgiving for two companies that track 911 calls to get complete information to E911 personnel so follow-up calls could be made.
“This is the second time in three months that there have been multiple failures that caused the redundant system to not deliver calls,” said David Tucker, the executive director of Vermont’s E911 system, according to VPR.