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Ariz.'s 911 system down for 5 hours

Damaged equipment in the central office prevented land-line users from reaching a dispatcher; police were unable to say how many people attempted to call 911

AzFamily.com

MESA, Ariz. — Emergency calls to Mesa’s police and fire dispatch center from land-line phones are now going through.

That wasn’t the case for more than five hours Wednesday night when CenturyLink, the local phone-service provider, experienced a system failure for all lines that fed into Mesa’s emergency dispatch center. Emergency calls made from cellphones were unaffected.

The phone lines went down between 6:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. Wednesday, said Alex Juarez, a CenturyLink representative. The 911 and non-emergency lines were restored around 12:40 a.m Thursday morning but roughly 700 other linesin central Mesa were still down at that time, Mesa police Detective Steve Berry said.

Full story: Mesa land-line 911 services restored after brief outage