NEW ORLEANS — The St. Bernard Parish Emergency 911 center is back up and running.
Parish officials spent the day trying to resolve the issues that took down the system Monday night.
According to the sheriff’s office which operates the 911 Communications Center, “(it) began experiencing issues with the telephone lines at the 911 call center which receives both emergency and non-emergency calls for service from St. Bernard Parish residents.
While the 911 center was able to receive some emergency calls, the service provider could not confirm that all calls to 911 were being received. In addition, no calls were being received through the non-emergency line.”
St. Bernard Fire Chief Charles Liccardi says he believes it was an AT&T problem.
“My understanding is there was some sort of fiber optic line that was cut or damaged in some way that affected us,” Liccardi said. “It had to do with landlines, AT&T landlines and certain prefixes. I believe it was ten prefixes that it affected.”
Chief Liccardi confirms the fire department’s 911 call center has one of the affected phone numbers.
“Our 911 center, the fire 911 center does have AT&T landlines, but we do have backups. So, the affect was it limited the numbers that we could receive emergency calls from.”
The parish communication district director Tyrell Morris says the problem was caused by an unknown interruption with the city’s call handling provider Intrado.
“Every 911 center in the nation has a backup plan if your primary phone system goes down,” Morris said. “So, we just activated those plans and super proud of the team here that really sprang into action to make that happen rather quickly.”
The 911 center started receiving calls again within 15 minutes, but it took about two hours to get the primary system back online.
The OPCD is now planning to upgrade to a newer cloud-based system.
Morris says it’s expected to provide greater reliability, redundancy and flexibility.
“The 911 infrastructure in the whole state is aged,” Morris said. “It’s legacy. It’s time for us to all collectively upgrade to newer, more robust technology.”
He’s hoping to have the upgrades completed by July 1.
Back in St. Bernard, Chief Liccardi says it’s important to get any lingering problems with his 911 system corrected as we head into hurricane season.
“Our communications center will get with the sheriff’s office communications center and I’m sure we’ll get with AT&T and make sure this isn’t an ongoing issue and that it’s corrected.”
AT&T released a statement about the St. Bernard outage.
According to a spokesperson, "Service has been restored for wired phone customers in the St. Bernard Parish area after we made repairs to an equipment failure today. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate the patience of our customers."