911 service outage impacts South Dakota

RAPID CITY, S.D. (KOTA) - Areas around the country lost access to 911 service Wednesday night, April 17, including all of South Dakota. The outage was reportedly caused by a fiber cut occurring during the installation of a light pole.

In Pennington County, officials acted quickly to notify the public.

Dustin Willett is Pennington County’s director of emergency management. When he heard of the outage, he quickly activated a wireless emergency alert. This system, developed by FEMA, allows emergency management officials to ping the cell phones of people in their county to notify them of an important message. The first message came at 8:02 PM, highlighting the outage and providing the numbers for non-emergency dispatch lines - which served as a way to contact emergency personnel while 911 was down. 14 minutes later, Willett and his team sent a follow-up alert telling the public not to dial 911 to test the system. Several people have done so since the first report came out.

“That caused significant problems in dispatch both in terms of diagnosing what the problem was and then in the workload of trying to work through different calls for service,” said Willett.

The final wireless emergency alert came at 9:56 PM, notifying the public that 911 service had been restored. Fortunately, no major emergencies occurred while the service was down, and Pennington County law enforcement was able to respond to calls effectively despite the disruption.

“We were able to deal with any emergencies and any calls that came in on a timely basis and our contingency that we had in place to deal with these sort of things worked well,” said Casey Kenrick, a patrol lieutenant with the Pennington County Sheriff’s Office.

Outages like this one are rare, but it isn’t a bad idea for one to save the number of their local police department’s non-emergency line in case 911 isn’t an option.

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