The county's 911 director anticipates no further problems

Staff/wire report

YOUNGSTOWN

A burst steam pipe at an AT&T switching center in Akron interrupted 911 emergency services, but 911 is working now in Mahoning County and other Northeast Ohio counties.

Maggi McGee, director of Mahoning County’s 911 system, said its 911 system began coming back online at 11 p.m. Tuesday and was fully operational by 1 a.m. Wednesday.

Restoration of 911 service is AT&T’s first priority, McGee said. Mahoning County pays AT&T $8,000 a month to serve as its 911 host, and the county’s contract with the company runs for three more years, she added.

“This is way out of our hands. This is nothing any of us can control. It isn’t our system that went down. This is something that was catastrophic that happened up in Akron,” McGee explained.

“They’re the major provider in this area,” she said of AT&T. “Land lines and cellular were down, too,” she added.

This failure is unprecedented in the nearly 21-year history of 911 in Mahoning County, said McGee, who has been 911 director here since the system’s inception.

“All services affected by a burst steam pipe in an AT&T switching office in Akron early Tuesday evening are now restored. Technicians completed repair work Wednesday afternoon and services are currently running normally,” said Holly Hollingsworth, AT&T’s senior Ohio public relations manager.

The outage caused 911 systems to go down throughout several counties also including Columbiana, Summit, Medina and Portage and Stark. Trumbull County was not affected.

The disruption affected all eight 911 answering points in Mahoning County and forced emergency callers to use 10-digit telephone numbers to reach local police and fire departments and the dispatching center in the county administration building, if the callers were fortunate enough to have land-line or cellular service, McGee said.

McGee said she was unaware of any complaints concerning missed or delayed emergency responses during the telephone service disruption.

“The PUCO staff will have a series of discussions with AT&T and do an after-action assessment,” of the emergency events and how they were handled, said Matt Schilling, a spokesman for the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio.

“We’ll identify any lessons learned and any deficiencies in their response to the emergency and see where that leads us” in terms of further action by PUCO staff or the commission, he said.

McGee said she sent technicians Wednesday to each of the county’s answering points for the system to make sure everything is running smoothly, but she added she anticipates no problems.

She said all of the repairs were done on AT&T’s end, and there was nothing the county needed to do to get the system back up and running.

McGee said the failure was felt throughout Northeast Ohio. She said the county’s 10-digit number to the 911 center downtown worked smoothly, and there were no problems or complaints.

The service had been down since about 6 p.m. Tuesday, the AT&T spokeswoman said.

The Akron Fire Department said the burst pipe sprayed water over electrical equipment. The six-story building, on Bowery Street, is equipped with backup generators, but they were of no help. Battery backup systems failed as well. As a result, phone lines and cell service went down.