911 outages plague Wyoming, put lives at risk

“We track communications with local Homeland Security coordinators, including their reports of outages to communications,” Wyoming Office of Homeland Security Director Lynn Budd explained to the Wyoming State Legislature’s Joint Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee earlier this week. “In a cursory review of these reports to our office, there have been 13 of these incidents in the past 12 months. These include outages to the 911 system as well as the ability to page out emergency responders.”

“One of the worst things I have to deal with as a supervisor is having to be notified by the public when we’re having problems with our service,” said Park County Sheriff’s Office Communications Supervisor Monte McClain.

The state of Wyoming’s current Telecommunications Act is coming up on its sunset, and the Elections, Corporations and Political Subdivisions Committee is considering how to make this transition happen smoothly – and how to craft future legislation governing telecommunications in Wyoming.

One of the most impactful aspects of telecommunications is its role in emergency services, from allowing the public to call 911 to helping first responders communicate with each other and with dispatch.

“Being able to dial 911 is an essential service,” commented Wyoming Emergency Communications 911 Planning Coordinator Aimee Binning. “That’s a life-or-death situation.”

Torrington alone has faced a slew of 911 outages over the past year.

“Since January 2023, our agency has had seven outages totaling approximately 215 hours of 911 downtime,” Torrington Police Department Communications Supervisor Bailye Goulart testified.

The most recent incident, she explained, was brought to the police department’s attention by a citizen who had tried to call 911 four times on four different phones when his 93-year-old grandmother fell; at that point, she said, it was later confirmed that the line had been experiencing issues for at least 22 hours.

A day later, Lumen Technologies, the phone company, sent the police department a ticket notifying it of an outage.

Between when the citizen contacted the police department on January 31 and when it finally managed to have two successful test calls placed to the dispatch center on February 5, Lumen told the department that it had fixed the problem, only for citizens to continue to be unable to call the Torrington PD’s 911 center at least twice.

“Three of these outages lasted two days or more – and of these seven outages, we were only notified by Lumen of four of them,” Goulart observed. “This most recent outage could have cost a woman her life, and we had no notice there was even a problem.”

The state of Wyoming does have a failsafe system intended to route 911 calls that don’t go through to the nearest dispatch center to another nearby one; ultimately, a call could even end up at a statewide selective router in Cheyenne. This system is a dated – and flawed – one, McClain pointed out.

“We are dealing with equipment that was considered state of the art in 1972,” he remarked.

In addition to its questionable reliability, the phone company charges each public safety answering point (PSAP) a rate based on its distance from the selective router in Cheyenne.

For counties farther away from Cheyenne, this means that simply maintaining 911 phone lines is a significant expenditure.

Park County pays approximately $81,000 per year, he said, and his department is left trying to explain to taxpayers why such an expensive service has so many outages.

Some counties have come up with creative solutions to 911 outages, including requesting that 911 calls be redirected to first responders’ cell phones during an outage.

This means, however, that these calls aren’t being recorded and logged. And while there are fail safes built into the system and workarounds being developed by PSAPs around the state, redirecting and transferring calls can add up to precious time lost before local emergency services even know there’s a need to send out responders.

The issue of outages is compounded by the fact that the state of Wyoming doesn’t have specific regulations of its own concerning at what point phone companies need to notify people of an outage – meaning that the companies simply go by the federal regulations, designed for areas with much denser populations.

The threshold for when phone companies need to send out a notification of an outage is 90,000 minutes of subscriber outage, McClain explained, after which the company has half an hour to send out an outage notification.

In areas more densely populated, this threshold means that phone companies don’t have to send out notifications for every 20 or 30 second interruption of service; in Wyoming, it means that notifications aren’t sent out for hours or even days.

“In Fremont County, it would need to be down for almost two hours” across the entire county before hitting that 90,000 subscriber minutes threshold, he said. “911 telecommunication providers do need to have a level of accountability … We need them to be notifying us.”

The state has slowly been working toward meeting the application requirements for federal grants to upgrade its system to a modern next-generation 911 system.

Maintaining the out-of-date system at 34 different PSAPs around the state has become increasingly expensive, and upgrading to a new system could mean a more reliable – and hopefully less costly – service.

State Sen. Cale Case, R-Lander, also suggested that the state could look into reducing its number of PSAPs.

The Elections, Corporations and Political Subdivisions Committee will likely also be looking into much lower thresholds for phone companies’ requirements to send out outage notifications in Wyoming.

This story was published on April 27, 2024.