Emergency coordinators react to Thursday's 911 outage

It’s a safe bet there will be some review of communications, following yesterday’s failure of a router and its backup that interrupted emergency communications for most of the day in several southeast Nebraska communities. Jefferson County Emergency Management Coordinator John McKee says he’s had some early discussions with Emergency Managers Mark Meints in Gage County and B.J. Fictum in Saline County. They are hoping to discuss what can be done if this type of situation happens again.
McKee says his county was fortunate to not have a rash of emergencies during the outage. Much of south central Nebraska has been in extreme fire danger or red flag conditions this week. He says the winds were strong and conditions were dry.
McKee says communication outages normally involve a break or cut in a cable, and are rectified quickly. In this case, there was sporadic loss of service over a longer period of time. He says you could have service one minute but five minutes later service would again be down.
McKee says the outage will make emergency management coordinators look at vulnerability when communication is lost.
Windstream officials said this morning that the communications outage was solved at around midnight. It began at seven-45 yesterday morning.