The director of Monroe County's Emergency Communications Department is providing more details about the technical problem that caused issues for some callers to 911 on Monday night. Starting just after 9:00 p.m, some people calling 911 in Monroe County may have had a fast busy signal. John Merklinger says that was related to a problem with a cable at a Frontier telephone office.
"The majority of calls still came into the 911 center. There were some customers that did try and call and did get a busy signal and when they hung up and tried to call again would often get through because it would go through the second central office and the call would come in to 911. "
Merklinger says the actual problem only lasted about two hours, but they kept the 911 system on a special backup plan for a total of about four hours just to make sure everything was working properly.
Merklinger says problems like this are pretty rare, noting that he has seen very few of them in the 14 years he has been Director of Emergency Communications.
"In that 14 years we've had over 20 million calls come into the 911 center, this is only the third phone problem we've had in that 14 years that's impacted the public. So I think we do have an effective service plan and maintenance plan and get good service from Frontier, unfortunately like all pieces of equipment occasionally something can break. "
