Report on November 25th power failure
The 911 call center
/ file photo
SYRACUSE -- Onondaga County Emergency Communications commissioner John Balloni says the circumstances that caused the 911 power failure could not have been anticipated. Two weeks ago, at 10:17 on the morning of November 25th, the uninterruptible power supply was interrupted at the 911 Center. A contractor's electrician working on the wiring in the radio room caused a minor short, which tripped a circuit breaker resulting in a power surge that caused a main breaker for the system to trip, taking the operations floor down completely.
"Something that virtually never happens," according to Commissioner Balloni. "Because of our back up batteries, because of our back up generator, it just doesn't happen, so it took a few moments for us to realize."
Commissioner Balloni told the Onondaga County Legislature Tuesday he strongly believes that no calls were lost as 911 personnel began handling emergency calls "the old fashioned way" from the emergency 911 back up site. Call takers were writing down information, then handing off to runners who would get the information to dispatchers. The computer operated dispatch system was down for only 28 minutes, and full service was restored at no expense to the county. The equipment vendor is absorbing all costs associated with the outage.
Could this happen again? "We're working to make sure that doesn't happen", Balloni says, "But I think technology being what it is, there's always some single point of failure that some engineer somewhere didn't think about or something happens that nobody anticipated. So there's always that potential."
Balloni says the technical services team at the 911 Center will be working with the system vendor and county electricians to analyze the cause of that 28 minute failure and develop strategies to avoid similar incidents in the future.
