LAKE COUNTY, Fla. – After a widespread 911 outage, officials are sharing which contingencies helped ensure calls didn’t go unanswered.
The outage started in Lake County and impacted several other counties, including Marion, Citrus, and Osceola.
Lake County’s Public Safety Director David Kilbury said because the outage was so widespread, at first, they didn’t know what they were up against.
Kilbury told us he has never seen a 911 outage of that magnitude.
“That was the system of the network of how calls come in and so that’s not really our expertise,” Kilbury said. “But when our redundant system notified us that we were not receiving correctly, they were rolled to Sumter County.”
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Kilbury said Sumter County may have been handling 911 calls for multiple counties on Tuesday in addition to their own.
He said they were able to respond to calls for both police and fire, including a shooting and a structure fire.
“We have a contingency plan, and our plan worked successfully,” Kilbury said. “We train on that plan, and we train as we fight, and we fight as we train. So you would think it would have been a massive failure, it actually was the absolute success.”
Officials confirmed the outage was caused by a fiber optic cable that was cut in the Clermont area.
News 6 heard reports the cable may have been cut by Lumen Technologies. We reached out to the company and they sent us a statement which said:
“Some customers in Lake, Sumter, and Osceola counties experienced difficulty reaching 9-1-1 services yesterday due to a fiber cut caused by a third-party construction company not affiliated with CenturyLink {Lumen}. While the 9-1-1 centers and core 9-1-1 network remained operational—and are designed with redundancy—some voice calls were unable to connect to the 9-1-1 network.
“Our teams responded immediately and worked around the clock to restore service as quickly as possible. We take service reliability and public safety seriously and are thoroughly reviewing this incident to identify opportunities to strengthen our network resilience and minimize the impact of third-party disruptions on essential services like voice and Internet.”
Since the outage, 911 services have been restored to the impacted counties.
Kilbury also told us the 911 texting service proved to be a good resource. Emergency officials told us dispatchers were able to help 64 people in Lake County via text while 911 was down on Tuesday.