Public safety answering points (PSAPs) and Washington state officials...

Public safety answering points (PSAPs) and Washington state officials were not notified by CenturyLink or its contractor, Intrado, about the April 10 outage of 911 calls, said the Washington State E9-1-l Coordinator’s Office in a comment (http://bit.ly/1sYbuoN) posted in FCC docket 14-72 on Tuesday. About 770 911 calls were delivered to the PSAPs, while about 4,500 911 calls failed during the outage, the filing said. “Due to the sudden increase in the volume of trouble calls, the nation-wide CenturyLink 9-1-1 Repair Center quickly became overloaded. Consequently, most of the calls to the Repair Center went unanswered, or were put on hold for extended periods -- some of those hold-times measured in hours.” Neither CenturyLink nor Intrado provided any instructions to PSAPs on how to mitigate the impact. “The PSAPs were left on their own to try to figure out how to provide some level of service to the public,” the filing said. The comments were similar to those filed by the King County’s E-911 Program Office in (http://bit.ly/1nPAgBZ) in June. The FCC Public Safety Bureau began an investigation into the outage May 19 (CD May 20 p18). The Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission has also opened a state investigation. “Intrado is also fully committed to the Commission’s goal of reliable and resilient emergency communications networks,” the company said in a filing Tuesday (http://bit.ly/TDEhys). “The root cause of the technical failure has been corrected; enhanced alarming with routine manual checks have been implemented; training and procedures have been enhanced to achieve more effective monitoring and problem detection.” A feature of the Intrado architecture’s legacy redundancy and compatibility, involving the PSAP trunk manager (PTM) functionality, was the root cause of the outage, said that company. “When developing any new technology, every single possible contingency cannot be identified or tested in advance of deployment. And, to try to do so before deploying new technology would frustrate the Commission’s goals and the purpose of 911 innovation.” Intrado said “issues will occur and not all contingencies can be known or addressed in advance.” CenturyLink and Intrado were not immediately available for further comment.