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Burglary Turns Off 911
from the whoops dept
You would think, these days, that something as critical as 911 would have some redundancy in place, should some part of the telephone network experience a bit of trouble. Apparently that's not true. Some burglars attempted to steal a bunch of expensive circuit boards from a Verizon building, but were caught when police noticed not an alarm from building, but a notification that 911 systems were crashing, leaving 250,000 people without access to emergency 911 service. Eventually, it appears they tracked the problem back to the Verizon building, and a police officer arrived just in time to see the burglars walking out of the building with all the circuit boards. The question, of course, is what kind of 911 system crashes the second a single circuit board in a single location gets yanked out?
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No Subject Given
As someone who's had to step in to work on 911 systems in a few areas before, I can tell you:
What kind of 911 systems crash with the removal or failure of a single component?
A lot of them. A whole lot.
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Re: No Subject Given
Yup.
Some smaller towns really cheap out on the service.
Years ago I worked for a rather unscrupulous, sales-exec driven answering service and they got a contract for 6 small towns (100K to 200K people in each) to do 911 for them.
Here's the problem:
- NO training in emergency calls, yet we had to answer.
- NO knowledge of the cities (they were 100 miles away) or their geography (real fun when the guy calling in a fire doesn't know the address).
A bunch of us flatly refused to answer the lines for those reasons and because the contract ALSO stipulated that while the COMPANY was not to be held liable for any errors, OPERATORS enjoyed no such protection.
So the story above comes as no surprise to me at all.
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