Outage knocks-out 911 call center

MAT-SU -- Last Thursday around noon the consoles and telephones at 9 G Base, the 911 emergency call center in the Palmer police station, flickered due to a power outage. Then the consoles went dead when a back-up generator failed to start up.

Earlier that same day, the roof at the Cottonwood Creek Public Safety Building sustained severe damage -- the building where the only back-up console for the Valley's central dispatch sits. That building's generator was also out of service at the time.

In ordinary circumstances, the generator in Palmer would have been up and running in seconds, according to Christine Fritz, communications supervisor for Palmer Police Department. But these weren't ordinary circumstances. And the situation outside the dispatch center wasn't ordinary either.

Gale-force winds stirred embers and re-ignited old fires. Winds also knocked down power lines to start new fires, blew tractor trailers off roads and were generally keeping dispatchers constantly busy.

"We lost power to the building and the generator did not automatically come on. We lost telephones and we lost our dispatch consoles. Two of our consoles kept working for a short period of time," Fritz said Friday.

Emergency dispatchers are ready to be busy, according to Fritz, but to be a dispatcher and to know that 911 calls are coming in that you can't answer was doubly frustrating -- more frustrating than manning a dispatch console during a busy shift.

"We were dead in the water," Fritz said.

That situation would last between 30 minutes and two hours -- emergency officials hadn't yet sat down to figure out exactly how long -- but things went smoothly during that time, according to Fritz and Mat-Su Borough Emergency Services Director Jack Krill.

Once she realized the generator in Palmer was not working, Fritz made a decision to get to Wasilla where Krill had set up an Emergency Operations Center to coordinate borough-wide emergency efforts. The center was at Central Mat-Su Fire Department's station 61, the fire station on Lucille Street in Wasilla. Before she left Palmer, Fritz notified the Alaska State Troopers that all the 911 calls in her service area would be forwarded to the AST dispatch center on Fort Richardson.

"We think that they did [go smoothly] -- based on the conditions that we had," Krill said. "The contingency plan that we fell back on was kind of spur-of-the-moment and based on the technical expertise of our people," Krill said.

Equipment also played a role. Krill said recent radio equipment upgrades allow for better communications between fire and ambulance stations. Those fire and ambulance stations were also manned with paid personnel because the number of emergency calls had been at peak levels since the night before.

"We identified the immediate need areas in the Valley and then staffed the stations that serve those areas," Krill said, adding that each station could serve as a base of operations for individual emergencies or for more than one emergency at a time.

Also at a peak level last Thursday was the number of ears listening for emergency calls, according to Krill.

"One position on our pager switches allows the user to listen to every page-out that happens," Krill said, who said the storm and the response to the Kerttula farm fire south of Palmer Wednesday night had likely inspired most emergency responders to listen-in to all pages.

Still, the dispatch center went dark during a nasty storm that was bringing nearly constant emergency calls. Both Krill and Fritz said there will be debriefings in the future to figure out how things might have gone better, but also insisted that both the storm response and the dispatch back-up plan went well.

"[Trooper dispatchers] were -- no doubt -- very, very busy handling their own calls, when, without a warning of any kind, we diverted all of our 911 calls to them," Fritz said. "They normally answer their own 911 calls and take the overflow from us … It sounds like they did a very good job, considering the circumstances that were pushed on them."

She also used a cell phone to call engineers at Matanuska Telephone Association. MTA spokesperson Jackie Whitstine said there is almost no chance that any calls went unanswered during the storm.

"There is a 24-second timer for 911 calls to be answered. If there is no answer within that time period, which is approximately four rings, then our switch immediately recognizes that and routes the call automatically to the alternate dispatch center," Whitstine said. "Which means there is no down time for those 911 calls at all."

Once Fritz notified MTA of the power outage the 24-second wait time was removed, according to Whitstine.

"At that point, they just took off the 24-second wait time because the call just goes to that alternate dispatch anyway -- it just goes directly to the state trooper dispatch."

Fritz grabbed an emergency medical dispatch book -- a book used to talk callers through first aid techniques while they wait for an ambulance -- and rode to Wasilla in Palmer Police Chief Russ Boatright's police cruiser.

"We were going code red, so it didn't take us long," she said.

When Fritz arrived at station 61 she called AST dispatchers on a land line. Two calls were waiting, she said. One was a downed power line with sketchy address information in Suburban Country Estates, according to Fritz. The other was a grass fire. Trooper dispatchers had taken the caller's name and number for the grass fire so Fritz could call back.

Fritz said both calls went smoothly. She was playing catch-up but at least she was in her own element -- at least halfway in her element -- normally she would speak directly to the caller on the telephone and give directions directly to emergency responders over the radio. At the operations center, she gathered information from AST dispatchers and passed written information to other workers who would relay the information over the radio.

In the meantime, borough public works employees were working on the generator at the Cottonwood Creek public safety building on Seward Meridian Road where the back-up dispatch console is located, according to Krill.

"It's only a one-person console, but that is our back-up," Krill said. "We had some mechanical problems with our generator as well."

Soon, Fritz and dispatcher Casey Savage were at that console, despite working under a severely damaged roof.

"We were able to use that console," Krill said, "The building was a little cold but we were able to use that console for back-up."

The power at Palmer PD was restored at about the same time, according to Fritz.

"Happily, when I got to station 65, [Cottonwood Creek] I learned that 9-G Base was once again operable," Fritz said. "We kept Casey [Savage] at Cottonwood for approximately a half an hour because we wanted to make sure that the Palmer dispatch center stayed operational."