For 40 minutes on Saturday morning, those who called 911 in Hamilton County outside of Cincinnati couldn’t get through.
Between 9:37 a.m. and 10:17 a.m. that morning, calls from 27 different phone numbers were missed, Hamilton County Communication Center Director Andrew Knapp told the Hamilton County commissioners on Thursday. Some callers may have called multiple times.
A three-second power surge near the 911 dispatch center in Colerain Township caused a loss of power to the equipment that routes calls to the dispatchers.
“It was only a three-second surge, but just like a lightning strike, that surge was catastrophic,” Knapp said.
No calls appear life-threatening
Dispatchers called the numbers of the missed calls back within nine minutes of power being restored and none of the calls appeared life-threatening, Knapp said.
“There were one or two (emergency) transport type of incidents,” Knapp said. “Make no mistake. All calls to 911 are incredibly important to us. We take that business very seriously.”
Dispatchers found with at least seven of the callbacks that an ambulance or police had already been dispatched, a log of the calls obtained by The Enquirer showed.
In several instances, the person called the fire department directly. Six of the callbacks went to voicemail.
One call was a suicidal person. An ambulance was dispatched immediately when dispatchers called the person back. Another involved a person at a gas station who called 911 when someone refused to move from one of the gas pumps. One caller wanted help with a leaky faucet that flooded a house.
Among the unknowns for dispatchers was what those who called 911 during this period heard ‒ whether the phone just kept ringing, was disconnected or delivered a busy signal.
Cause under investigation
Knapp said they don’t know the reason for the power surge or why the backup systems failed. They will have experts look at the equipment and determine why calls were not rerouted to the Cincinnati 911 dispatch, as the system is designed to do.
A dispatch employee noticed a flash near the building, Knapp said. The lights flickered but remained on. Radio contact with the Cincinnati dispatch center, local police and emergency responders also remained.
What they didn’t know was a critical piece of equipment, called an uninterruptable power source, stopped working. As a result, the power for the phones and dispatch equipment never switched back from battery power and eventually ran out.
The 911 dispatch center has had three power outages in the past four years, but every time, the backup systems worked. For some reason that didn't happen this time, Knapp said. This is the first time he's aware of that a power outage led to no calls being rerouted.
'A perfect storm of events'
Because the lights and communications with Cincinnati dispatch and local emergency responders remained on, dispatchers initially thought all the backup systems were working as well, Knapp said.
Knapp said the communications center will give a report to the commissioners and public once they determine the cause of the failure.
"This was a perfect storm of events that not only impacted our system but our redundancy in our system," said Hamilton County Administrator Jeff Aluotto.
Knapp and Aluotto addressed the question of why dispatchers simply didn't call 911 on their phones to test it out when they knew there was an issue. They said that would happen the next time there's an outage.
Hamilton County's 911 Center covers all of Hamilton County outside of the city of Cincinnati, which has its own 911 operations.
Sewer and water districts also had outages
The incident comes on the heels of a major power outage at Cincinnati's largest wastewater treatment plant in Lower Price Hill. The sewer treatment failure on March 5 released millions of gallons of wastewater a day into Mill Creek, which then flows into the Ohio River. Power was restored this past Friday.
In May 2022, Greater Cincinnati's main water treatment plant suffered a power outage for 10 hours, forcing the city to rely on water from a neighboring county.
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