WICHITA, Kan. (KSNW) – The 911 lines are back up and running.
“We had 911 calls that were coming in. People calling, but we could not answer calls,” said Elora Forshee with Sedgwick County 911.
It was not just a Sedgwick County problem for roughly two hours early Sunday afternoon. Nearly all of the southern tier of counties in Kansas experienced similar issues.
KSN News asked the Kansas 911 Coordinating Council if the software issue has been fixed.
“But there seemed to be some software that was conflicting yesterday regarding call delivery,” said Michele Abbott, spokeswoman for the council. “All the applications were not responding the same. Somewhere routing the calls was not working.”
AT&T is the carrier for many of the southern tier of counties. But, Abbott says, AT&T may not be to blame. Some applications for routing calls were just not working. And while AT&T says the issue had been solved, Sedgwick County is making moves just in case.
“So, we are told the issue is solved,” said Forshee. “I’m so sorry this happened (Sunday) yesterday. It is absolutely one of my worst nightmares.”
Forshee says at one point their call center was writing down the numbers of those who called but were not having calls answered. They were calling those numbers to see what the emergency might have been.
Abbott says they have not experienced this issue before, and she adds they are still diagnosing the routing problem and the software.
“We know the issue has been fixed,” said Abbott. “But we are doing a deep dive to ensure we have answers and that it will not happen again. This has been a very robust system.”