Over this time, CenturyLink, the company contracted by the state to run the 911 emergency-call system, didn’t inform law-enforcement agencies of the problem, according to a state report released Tuesday.
Instead, emergency responders, law enforcement and county sheriff’s departments learned of the outage from citizens or neighboring departments. Others were informed by the Washington State Patrol or the Seattle Police Department, which itself had been notified by citizens.
The report by Washington Utilities and Trade Commission (WUTC) staff revealed those details and recommended CenturyLink be fined up to $2.9 million for the outage, which crippled the entire 911 system statewide.
The report also recommended the company take steps to prevent another breakdown.
“In commission staff’s experience, the event was unprecedented in both its scope and duration,” the WUTC staff report said. “Every person in Washington was affected because the ability for anyone to access 911 was almost nonexistent.”
The outage began a few minutes before midnight on April 10 and lasted until about 6 a.m. that day. In addition to Washington, it hit parts of six other states — California, Florida, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and South Carolina — and spurred the Federal Communications Commission to conduct its own investigation, according to the WUTC.
While the report conceded that the full impact of the outage could not be known, “the safety of Washington residents was severely threatened and loss of life could have occurred as a result of this statewide 911 outage.”
Nonetheless, the report outlined several incidents where people had tried and failed to make 911 calls.
In Cowlitz County, a man was assaulted outside a tavern; in the Puyallup area, a woman had to flag down a police officer to report a domestic-violence incident; and an Everett woman unsuccessfully called 911 37 times after a man broke into her home, according to a report by the Daily Mail newspaper in England.
“She was later able to get through to 911 services and police arrived around 3 a.m. — over an hour after the man began his attempt to get through her door,” the story reported.
In an email to The Seattle Times, CenturyLink blamed the failure on the company it had contracted with to provide the 911 system.
“The third-party vendor, Intrado, has acknowledged that the outage was caused by a faulty component in its call routing platform, which prevented the system from properly processing calls and launching redundancies,” Meg Andrews, spokeswoman for CenturyLink, wrote in the email.
A problem like this hadn’t been encountered before and CenturyLink worked with public-safety officials to resolve it once the company learned of the issues, Andrews added.
Given those circumstances, “CenturyLink is troubled by the punitive nature of the fine recommended by the WUTC staff,” Andrews wrote.
The power failure happened because Intrado had a limit of 40 million calls at one of its two call-handling centers. The center takes calls from multiple states, and when it reached 40 million calls that morning it stopped taking more, according to the report.
After more than six hours, Intrado rerouted 911 calls to its other call-handling center, allowing the return of 911 services.
The WUTC staff report’s recommendation of fining CenturyLink up to $2.9 million is derived from applying two separate penalties of up to $250 to each of the 5,840 failed 911 calls for violating two different state laws.
A third part of the suggested fine would be up to $100 for each of the 51 violations of a third law for failing to notify county and state jurisdictions that run the 911 system locally.
The report also recommended, among other things, having the state’s 911 calls distributed through both of Intrado’s call-handling centers, rather than just one.
The recommendations would need approval by the three-member commission to take effect.
The 911 system in Washington state is overseen by the state Military Department’s Emergency Management Division, which contracts with CenturyLink for 911 services.
The state Emergency Management Division could not be reached for comment.
©2014 The Seattle Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
