A fiber-optic cable cut in the Omaha area resulted in a major 911 outage in Nebraska, affecting nearly 60% of the state’s 911 centers. The incident occurred on Thursday night when a contractor accidentally severed a cable owned by telecommunications company Lumen. As a result, 39 out of 68 Nebraska 911 centers, including those in Douglas and Sarpy counties, were unable to receive 911 calls. Affected centers had to provide their nonemergency numbers for handling 911 calls, although they were still able to handle text messages to 911.
Lumen technicians worked diligently to restore service, and by Friday morning, most centers had their 911 service fully restored. Sarpy County’s Emergency Communications Director, Bill Muldoon, reported that their dispatch center began receiving 911 calls again around 3 a.m., while Douglas County’s 911 center director, Kathy Allen, said service was restored around 7:15 a.m.
According to Mark Molzen, a spokesperson for Lumen, there were actually two separate fiber cuts: one in Omaha and another in Minneapolis. Neither contractor involved in the cuts was working with Lumen. The incident blocked customers from multiple service providers from reaching the 911 network with their voice calls.
The scale of the 911 outage was described as unprecedented by officials, who expressed concerns about how the system failed. The state of Nebraska requires redundancies to prevent such failures, but questions remain about why the backup systems did not prevent the outage.
Despite the challenges, dispatchers showed ingenuity in finding workarounds. They used an application called RapidSOS to identify wireless devices that attempted to call 911 and reached out to those individuals to find out their emergencies.
In a separate incident, Lincoln and Lancaster County experienced their own 911 outage following a fire at a Windstream office in downtown Lincoln. This resulted in an outage that affected several counties in Southeast Nebraska. The outage was resolved on Sunday morning.
Overall, the 911 centers made efforts to inform the public about the outage through social media messages and emergency notifications sent to cellular devices. However, some unforeseen issues arose, such as people unintentionally calling the 911 center when they tapped on the nonemergency number sent in the notification.
Fortunately, no major emergencies were reported during the outage in Douglas County, and in Sarpy County, there was only one 911 text received for a felony assault at a store, resulting in an arrest and the victim being taken to a hospital in stable condition.
While the outage caused significant disruption, the dedication and resourcefulness of the dispatchers helped mitigate the impact. The Nebraska Public Service Commission will be conducting investigations into the outages to identify the cause and explore solutions to prevent similar issues in the future.
