By Justin McClelland, Dayton Daily News (Ohio)

WARREN COUNTY (OH): Warren County was left without 911 service for more than 14 hours in the wake of a catastrophic windstorm in late June and officials are still trying to determine why.

On Friday, June 29, Warren County lost 911 services at approximately 5:30 p.m. with the emergency call service not being restored until 8 a.m. the next day, said Michael Bunner, director of emergency services for Warren County.

“The 911 outage was a widespread issue in a seven state region,” Bunner said. “Three million people were without 911 service.”

Bunner said that no one died as a result of the outage.

“I’m fairly disappointed in the events that occurred,” said Warren County Commissioner Dave Young, who is looking to speak with both representatives of Century Link and the state of Ohio about why the failure occurred and lasted for such a long time. “It’s disheartening to learn that the state of Ohio controls so much of the telecommunications system and no matter what safeguards we put in place, to some degree we don’t control it.”

Young said that 911 service is one of the most vital services the county provides.

“Having 911 go down is just not an option,” Young said. “Our residents pay taxes specifically to have that service available no matter what.”

The outage was caused by power surges stemming from a fierce storm that pelted much of the Midwest with winds of 70 miles per hour or greater, thunderstorms and even tornado warnings. More than 40,000 people in Warren and Butler counties lost electricity as a result of the storm.

“There was a such a surge of power it shorted out substations that connect the lines to our dispatchers,” Bunner said.

A backup plan is in place that is supposed to reroute 911 calls to the nearest next available dispatch center should one dispatch center go down. However, those centers in Warren County and in other places around the country also went down.

Bunner said the county was working with Century Link, the company that operates the 911 communication lines, to set up a better redundancy plan.

“In the 911 connection there’s something we call ‘the fatal mile,'” Bunner said. “Basically two switches come into one central branch before coming to the communication center. If something happens to that last mile of line, we’re out of luck.”

Bunner said the county was looking at ways to create a redundancy plan for this “fatal mile” that would ensure the 911 system could remain operational. Bunner said the outages had nothing to do with the county’s plan to purchase bandwidth on the state-run MARCS system for emergency radio communications.

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