Gwinnett, Ga., 9-1-1 service back up; cause of crash a mystery

By George Chidi and Mike Morris
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Copyright 2007 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

GWINNETT COUNTY, Ga. — Gwinnett County police officials can’t tell what caused their 911 system to crash Wednesday morning.

But for about one hour and 40 minutes, callers trying to reach Gwinnett County’s emergency operators heard only a recording, telling them the phone line had been disconnected.

Gwinnett’s 911 dispatch center became aware of the problem about 6:30 a.m., said Gwinnett police spokesman Cpl. Darren Moloney. Communications staff and technicians from AT&T got the system running again at about 8:15 a.m., he said.

The county doesn’t know what went wrong, he said. The county fields about 2,000 calls a day at its call center in Lawrenceville, Moloney said. Telecommunications systems can tell where a caller is, either by using location systems built into most newer-model cellphones or from the landline address of the incoming phone call. A single button-push allows an operator to transfer the call to another police department, ambulance service or the fire department.

The county’s 911 call center has several back-up systems, Moloney said. The problem appears to have been getting emergency calls into the call center at all. “What is known is that all on-site Gwinnett County equipment was functioning properly,” Moloney said. “The problem appears to have originated somewhere between Atlanta and the county’s 911 center.”

AT&T hasn’t explained yet what it did to get Gwinnett’s 911 system back online, Moloney said. “Since we don’t know what exactly happened, it would be dense to say it won’t happen again,” he said.

Dawn Benton, a spokeswoman for AT&T, couldn’t say where the disruption occurred, either.

“Basically, we are still investigating to discover the root cause of the issue,” she wrote in an e-mail.

Still, police said it had no information about any life-threatening emergencies during the outage, Moloney said. And police services around Gwinnett County reported little effect from the outage.

Call volume was little changed at city police departments, department spokesmen said of the outage.

Five cities in Gwinnett County have their own police departments.

The county’s 911 center generally transfers police calls inside city limits to city police. But call volume wasn’t significantly affected at any of the city police departments.

“A lot of our local businesses prefer to call the [city’s] 10-digit number,” said Sgt. Tyler Thomas of the Lilburn Police. “That’s the number we have on our police cars.”

If the 911 system is down, Gwinnett fire Lt. Thomas Rutledge said residents needing to report an emergency should call 770-513-5911 or 513-5100.

“Callers should be prepared to give their address to the emergency dispatcher,” Rutledge said.

Rutledge also said residents could dial “0" to get an operator who can connect them to the appropriate emergency service.