Editor’s Note: Quotes have been lightly edited for content & clarity
On Friday, July 11th, Pennsylvania’s 911 network suffered prolonged interruptions to service. In Delaware County, a team led by the ECC Supervisor and Technical Staff guided a real-time response that kept the agency connected to the community and able to respond to critical emergencies.
We spoke with Chief of Communications Anthony Mignogna to hear about what happened and how they worked through the outage...
What happened…
“The afternoon/evening of last Friday, July 11th, we started to get indications of degraded service and almost no service for calls coming into our 911 center,” said Mignogna.
“The company that provides our calls through the State were unable to deliver certain amount of calls, and calls in which they delivered were degraded, in which they didn't present ANI/ALI or they would be dropped. This occurred, for an extensive time, upwards of 6 to 8 hours.”
That led to silence, punctuated by bursts of activity.
“We experienced long, idle times in which there was no call volume, and then we'd get sporadic spurs of intense call volume. On a Friday afternoon, that's something that's not really normal, especially within the summer.”
How DelCo responded…
“We went through our internal protocols and once the system that delivers our calls made a notification to us that they were experiencing some sort of issues, we went into our internal policies and procedures for that event.”
“How Prepared got involved in this outage is that through the technology you provide us, we can see, even though a call does not present to our telecommunicators, or basically present to the system, it does present in the Prepared application, where a phone number will present with limited ANI/ALI information,” explained Mignogna.
Why they relied on Prepared…
“The determination was made to staff a dedicated position to monitor the Prepared dashboard and that person's responsibility was to look for calls that presented in Prepared but for which there was no corresponding ANI/ALI through our CHE or through our CAD system. That way, we were able to identify calls that didn't present to our agency.”
Using Prepared, the team created a way to spot “calls that were never cleared out or never resolved,” explained Mignogna.
For those lingering entries, the staff, “Would initiate a reverse SMS message, or a text message sent out to the callers….it said, this is ‘Delaware County 911. Do you need assistance?’ A short, sweet canned message that was pre-populated, quick, right click, left click—boom, boom, boom—and we're sending out numerous messages…just rapid, firing them out a lot of them.”
How Prepared helped…
The team’s use of Prepared to send outbound texts gave the center a connection to callers and the ability to understand what kind of service they needed.
“There were a lot of the responses we got back where they were just testing the 911 system. Obviously there was a huge media campaign here and it was statewide, so everyone was aware of the outage and they wanted to see if it worked just in case they needed it,” Mignogna noted.
Among the sea of tests were about 15 to 20 emergencies requiring assistance.
A Life-Saving Intervention
One story in particular highlights the impact of the protocol.
“We sent out the pre-canned message and we received a response for a medical emergency within a municipality, a serious medical emergency…The caller replied, “Yes, I need help. My neighbor is unresponsive at such and such address.”
The telecommunicator followed up, asking, “Okay, is he or she breathing?” and the caller reiterated the address and added, “No, they're not breathing.”
“We were able to dispatch EMS…maybe this call would have not been answered, or it would have been delayed, if not for the use of this technology,” said Mignogna.
After dispatching field responders, the telecommunicator, following policy, switched from text to voice.
“If possible, voice instructions are the way to go, so then we transitioned from an SMS phone call to a voice phone call, a traditional phone call, and provided pre-arrival instructions until EMS arrived. Luckily it was not a cardiac arrest, and the person was transported to a local hospital.”
“A couple of years ago…[the caller] may or may not call local police station, they may or may not call local fire station, they may or may not call the 10-digit number and then, somehow we may or may not be notified…Obviously, that's gonna cause a huge time delay. If we didn't have it, I don't know what would have happened. Nothing, maybe, which is kind of scary and sad. Right? So fortunately, we did have Prepared.”
Looking Forward: A New Contingency Plan
The success in establishing and maintaining a connection with the community during the outage has led Delaware County to updating their protocols for future outages.
“Because of this success, we are going to adapt this procedure as part of a contingency policy in the event calls are not delivered to our CHE. This is the example we needed to make this part of our contingency, or our queue plan, in the event of an outage or a degradation,” said Mignogna.
“It was definitely a benefit to us during the outage that we had last Friday. Without it, a couple calls would’ve gone missing.”
