DELAWARE - 911 services are back up and running in Kent and Sussex counties after another outage was reported Sunday for AT&T customers. These frequent outages are starting to worry people in the First State.
Ken Bock is the CEO of Cheer Resource Center, which helps elderly people in Delaware. For vulnerable groups like that, 911 is extremely important.
He said, "It is a concern. So many of us have a frustration when we're working at home and our WiFi goes down, or internet service goes down for some duration or period, and that's not a life and death situation. Imagine if you are relying on 911 in a life and death situation, and that call doesn't go through. That's a problem. That's a serious problem."
But a 911 outage does not stop first responders from answering the call. As Norman 'Jay' Jones from the Ellendale Fire Company says, there are always backups in place if needed.
"The good thing about our system and how it's set up is there's always backup systems. There's more than one way to contact 911, there's more than one way for your 911 calls to be routed back into the system. So, to our knowledge, on a local level, we have not heard any of our citizens or our constituents raising a concern that their 911 emergency wasn't reached, or their 911 call wasn't answered," Jones said.
According to the Department of Safety and Homeland Security, there was no clear connection between Sunday's outage and the outages we saw over the past few weeks. If services are down during an emergency, you can text 911 from your phone or call the non-emergency numbers located on your police department's websites.
Now that 911 services are back online, the DSHS is focusing on identifying the problems and making sure it doesn't happen again.