Authorities: South Dakota 911 outage cause still unknown
Sioux Falls authorities say they’re still not sure what caused 911 services to be unavailable both in the city and statewide for about two hours Wednesday night.
“It’s obviously never ideal but I will say that our preparations and our ability to adapt to what happened last night quickly ensure that our public safety services continue to be delivered without that knowledge,” said Mayor Paul TenHaken at Thursday morning press conference regarding the outage.
Metro Communications interim director Mike Gramlick stated that just under 60 team members fielded 112 calls and texts last night during the outage. On average, he said, there are about 114 calls in that timeframe when 911 call services are functional.
The cause of the outage is still unknown, Gramlick said, adding that the city’s 911 service provider was looking into the issue and would update them when a cause was determined.
Several national outlets reported Thursday afternoon that officials from Lumen, a telecommunications company that provides 911 services, had explained some of the outages, with CNN quoting Lumen Global Issues Director Mark Molzen as saying “On April 17, some customers in Nevada, South Dakota, and Nebraska experienced an outage due to a third-party company installing a light pole – unrelated to our services.”
Both Gramlick and Brad Reiners, the communications director for the South Dakota Department of Public Safety, confirmed that South Dakota contracts with Lumen for 911 services but said they had not heard anything about the cause of the issue as of 12:15 p.m. on Thursday.
Calls to Molzen and other Lumen officials were not immediately returned.
Regan Smith, emergency manager for the City of Sioux Falls said that
people should ensure they can receive emergency alerts on their phones by checking their notification settings.
Gramlick said the outage became apparent at 7:59 p.m. saying that 911 calling services were down throughout Sioux Falls as well as the rest of South Dakota. Gramlick said services were restored on the South Dakota 911 system around 10:38 p.m. Wednesday evening.
Sioux Falls Chief of Police Jon Thum said that if anyone takes anything away from this incident, it’s to save the city’s non-emergency phone number, 605-367-7000, so that you always have quick access if something like this occurs again.