Derecho winds that knocked out 9-1-1 service for millions of people in parts of Virginia and West Virginia just two months ago caused a lot of questions about the reliability of 9-1-1 service. Those are questions the FCC wants answered.

FCC’s Chief of Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau David Turetsky told a packed room Monday afternoon at APCO’s annual conference in Minneapolis that his goal is simple.

“We are vigorously pursuing an inquiry into the outages,” he said. “We are going to use that information to make people safe, make communications more reliable and more resilient. Communications needs to be as reliable in the face of a natural disaster as it is when there’s not.”

The FCC is holding public meetings and gathering information from commercial providers, as well as interviewing affected PSAPs, to determine what went wrong. In addition, the FCC continues to seek public comment through September 4th from those affected or from professionals who experience similar structural or service losses in other areas of the country and may have some insight on how to prevent loss of service in the future.

“We are looking at PSAPs, cell sites, central offices, switching networks – we’re not ruling anything out,” added PSHSB Deputy Chief David Furth. “What were the causes? What are the facts? What circuits were affected? Where did the calls go? How was the system designed? Was there appropriate network monitoring? All of these questions are part of this inquiry.”

Furth stressed he felt very passionately about this topic and his entire staff took the inquiry very seriously.

“This inquiry will not drag on forever,” he said. “We will get a report out this fall.”