(Sedgwick County, Kan.) – Sedgwick County 9-1-1 Emergency Communication learned AT&T was doing work on the state system last night which impacted incoming calls. Originally, both Sedgwick County and Shawnee County were told their operations would not be impacted due to redundant circuits serving both 9-1-1 centers.
Communications received a call through its administrative line of the issue. Upon testing, Emergency Communication personnel found that people were getting recordings when calling 9-1-1 and were not getting through.
Once Sedgwick County 9-1-1 Emergency Communications were made aware of the situation, staff logged into the back-up phones and started taking inbound calls that were re-routed to that number. Currently, the length of time that 9-1-1 calls were not getting through to our phone system is unknown.
Shawnee County did, unexpectedly, experience the same outage as Sedgwick County.
9-1-1 Emergency Communications Director Elora Forshee is trying to get more information from AT&T, and the Coordinating Council. Going forward we will proactively move calls to our internal backup system through the duration of these AT&T maintenance periods.
We will provide an update when we know more about why this occurred, and any other details of this outage.
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