Battery Fails & Pennsylvania County 9-1-1 Dispatch Goes Down
Margaret Harding, Pittsburgh Tribune Review
A tractor-trailer crashing into a telephone pole might have caused an emergency radio communication failure in Allegheny County on Thursday.
The vehicle hit the pole in the 2900 block of Railroad Street in the Strip District at 6:56 a.m., Pittsburgh Public Safety Director Mike Huss said. By 7 a.m., an alarm informed shift commanders at the 9-1-1 center that radio dispatch channels out of the county’s facility on Railroad were disconnected, said Alvin Henderson, chief of the county’s Department of Emergency Services.
“That’s what seems to have initiated this whole thing,” Huss said.
The uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system, which makes sure sensitive radio equipment isn’t overloaded with electricity, received either an overcurrent or voltage spike that tripped all of its circuit breakers and blew internal fuses, Henderson said.
“It created a catastrophic failure of the UPS,” Henderson said.
After the alarm, shift commanders switched all the dispatch channels to back-up channels and sent the information over first responders’ mobile data terminals, Henderson said.
Technicians sent to the Railroad Street facility had to manually fix the UPS circuits, Henderson said. The system was back to normal by 10 a.m.
During the outage, a Bellevue resident called the 9-1-1 center and complained about a busy signal, Henderson said. The county publicized another number for residents to call in case others got the busy signal, although Henderson said the center received only one complaint.
In all, there were 37 calls to the alternate number between 7 and 10 a.m., up from 17 during the same time a week ago, Henderson said.
Because dispatchers were able to send information out through the mobile data terminals and because back-up channels were used, Henderson said he did not think the problem affected response times of police, firefighters and paramedics. Huss said he was not aware of any problems in the city.
“I would be surprised if it had any type of major effect,” Henderson said. “The mobile data terminals never went down, so they were still able to get the information they needed.”
Duquesne Light spokesman Joey Vallarian said the company had no power outages in the area of the county’s back-up facility. Vallarian said Duquesne Light found nothing wrong with its system.
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