Erie County's 911 system is working again. Erie County Legislator Ed Rath is thanking everyone who worked hard to quickly fix this issue, but as Public Safety Chair, says he has many questions.The 911 system went down about 4 a.m. and residents were asked to call their local police departments in case of an emergency. Callers received a busy signal as the county and Verizon worked to determine how the outage occurred and why the 911 back-up system did not kick in.
Emergency services officials say the system was knocked out by a power outage at the 911 dispatch center. County Executive Mark Poloncarz says there had been outages before, but never countywide.
During the past several years, the County has invested millions of dollars to upgrade the system. With this morning’s system failure, Legislator Rath says he is organizing a discussion to address the issue and why calls were not rerouted.
