Denver metro 911, non-emergency lines go down; Douglas Co. Sheriff wants answers

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6 days ago

DOUGLAS COUNTY, Colo. (KDVR) — A number of local dispatches experienced impacts Tuesday, with 911 and non-emergency lines down for hours. Some areas continued to deal with problems Wednesday.
They are the numbers to call when something is wrong: 911 or your local non-emergency line. However, something went wrong with some regional dispatches Tuesday. Douglas County's sheriff tells us they got an alert from one of the state-contracted network vendors.
'We were notified by Lumen that they were getting alarms that our 911 system might be down,' Douglas County Sheriff Darren Weekly said. 'Whenever that happens, we want to always alert the public that there is a potential if they're on a wireless phone, that for some reason the call may not go through.'
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Weekly says the sheriff's office sent out alerts on social media to the public, but there is an automatic system in place to make sure 911 calls still get answered in an outage.
'Through no human intervention, an automatic switch happens when our system goes down,' Sheriff Weekly said. 'It'll go to Arapahoe County. If Arapahoe County goes down, it goes to the Aurora Police Department. It Aurora goes down, it goes to Denver. So, somebody is answering those calls for service. My concern as the sheriff is Arapahoe County Sheriff's office, in their dispatch center, they already have a high call volume. We're adding on to their call volume. So, it's concerning that this is happening and it seems to be happening on a more frequent basis.'
The Denver Department of Public Safety tells FOX31 an outage on their non-emergency line yesterday was related to the City and County of Denver's citywide network outage, not the outages at other 911 centers in other jurisdictions.
We received the following statement from the Technology Services team:
'Yesterday around 11 a.m. the City and County of Denver experienced a failure in our virtual server environment which affected multiple applications and technology systems, including some limited interruptions to public services. The Denver Police Department's 911 line was never impacted. DPD's non-emergency line, however, was impacted, and we instructed community members to call 311, where their call was answered and then routed to DPD's non-emergency line. This outage was not related to the 911 issues jurisdictions across the state were experiencing yesterday.
'Our Technology Services team worked diligently with our vendor to fix the outage, and we were able to restore our systems shortly before 9 p.m. Our team continued to monitor our systems overnight into today and our vendor will continue to analyze data that was extracted after the restoration to determine the root cause of the failure.'
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As of Wednesday afternoon, Parker Police Department is still experiencing impacts. A spokesperson shared the following statement with FOX31:
'The Parker Police Department is aware of a regional 9-1-1 outage and the disruption in emergency services that it may cause our community. Parker Police is actively working with our telephone provider to restore all 9-1-1 lines as soon as possible. We are continuing to work with Douglas and Arapahoe County Communication Centers to receive our 9-1-1's and provide us with timely information so we can provide emergency services to our community. The complexity of the 9-1-1 system and advancing communication technology is not unique to the Parker Police Department and in this time of outage we will do everything we can to continue to serve our citizens in their time of need while working with our partners to restore this valuable communication system.'
'A lot of these technology companies, they're just typically doing this whenever there's a problem,' Sheriff Weekly said as he pointed his fingers. 'That's why there's an official investigation that takes place afterwards that's overseen by the Public Utilities Commission to identify what exactly happened. Was there a particular company that was at fault or was it a hardware that was a fault? What was the issue?'
Those are answers Weekly hopes can help as soon as possible.
'This seems to be happening more and more,' Weekly said. 'And my concern also is, if our system goes down and there is a major event, whether it be a natural disaster or a manmade disaster in another jurisdiction, it's just compounding the problem for that dispatch center. So we need to get to the bottom of it, figure out what's going on and fix it.'
FOX31 reached out the the PUC. We received the following statement:
'By Commission rules, the PUC will conduct an investigation of any 9-1-1 center outage lasting longer than four hours. If this was a network issue, the PUC will do a full investigation, which the results will be made public. If this was a problem with the phone system, that is not in PUC oversight. We are currently waiting to hear the cause of the outages so that we can determine next steps.'
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