Copyright American Press
On Sept. 25, Calcasieu Parish lost the ability to receive 911 calls from cellphones and IP-based phone systems. The outage began at 1 p.m. and ended around 3:15 p.m. As of Oct. 31, Calcasieu 911 has not received a report from either AT&T or the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on the reason that caused the outage that occurred in Louisiana and Mississippi. AT&T is the 911 provider in Calcasieu Parish. “This was not a single failure cut, but six or more separate connections that were cut with the last and final one coming about 1 p.m. on Sept. 25 – as a result of the cuts cellular customers, all the major carriers, could not access the public switch telephone network,” E911/Calcasieu Parish Public Safety Communications District Executive Director Richard McGuire, said. “It may be six months to a year from now until we know exactly what happened and why,” McGuire said. 911 was still able to receive calls from landlines, but not cell phones during the outage. It was not solely 911, either, cell phones had a reduced capability to call regular landline calls at this time as well. 911 was still able to receive 911 text messages during the outage. “In the past AT&T has done a really good job of keeping their network up, I’m not really sure what happened here,” McGuire said. McGuire has never experienced an outage like this one before since he began working at the Calcasieu Parish 911 Center. “This is the first time that I remember, and I’ve been here since 2002, that we had an outage that just affected cell phones like this, this is the first time I’ve ever seen this type of outage,” McGuire said. Residents of Calcasieu can breathe a little better tonight knowing that Calcasieu 911 does have a backup system in place to the traditional Analog 911 System. This new system is called RapidSOS. RapidSOS gets a direct feed of location information from all cell phones that dial 911 and it provides that in a separate communication link. RapidSOS gets its location information from Apple and Google, according to McGuire. “When our 911 system wasn’t able to accept cellular calls anymore, RapidSOS was still logging each time a citizen tried to call 911 and it would give us their location and cell phone number,” he said. McGuire said immediately once the telecommunicators noticed that calls were showing up in RapidSOS but not getting through the regular 911 system – the team immediately started using cellphones in the center to call the numbers back to figure out what their emergency was to help. “During the whole time of the outage you couldn’t call 911, but we had a record of folks that were trying to call 911 and we were able to contact them and were able to reach out to everyone that tried to call from a cell phone – we were able to reach out to them and help them,” he said. McGuire said he felt a little better knowing they were able to reach everyone that called 911 even if it took a minute to get it set up once the outage occurred. McGuire said residents were able to find out as soon as the outage occurred through calcashout notifications. Residents of Calcasieu Parish can sign up at calcashout.com to receive notifications regarding real-time parish updates, emergency alerts, event information and other critical information via text messaging or email. You do not have to be a Calcasieu resident to receive notifications but it will only give information regarding Calcasieu. Even if you live in Southwest Louisiana and work or travel to Calcasieu, it is a good thing to have, McGuire said. This is provided by the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. “It is a very good way to stay informed as to what’s going on in Calcasieu Parish,” he said.
