For three hours on Tuesday, residents of Park County who wanted to report an emergency to 911 had to call a seemingly random cellphone number that had been posted on Park County Sheriff’s Facebook page.
That’s because the office phone lines for the Sheriff’s Department in Park County were also out, along with cellphone services for other people in the area, after a fiber optic cable was cut sometime around 7:30 p.m. on Monday.
The location of the cut cable remains unclear, as does the scope of the outage. None of the phone companies involved would say how many customers lost services.
Park County Communications Supervisor and 911 Manager Monte McClain was told in a voice mail message from service provider Lumen Technologies that the cable was cut in Casper.
Brian Worthen, CEO of Visionary Broadband, one of Lumen’s other customers, told Cowboy State Daily that he was told in updates his company received that the cable was cut 1.25 miles outside of Cody, more than 200 miles away from Casper.
Visionary Broadband doesn’t provide services in that area.
A Lumen representative did not respond to inquiries about the discrepancy but told Cowboy State Daily that a third-party provider's fiber optic cable had been cut by “vandals.”
“Now I’m confused,” McClain told Cowboy State Daily after reading the Lumen representative’s statement. “The voicemails from Lumen said Casper … not Cody. And my agency has not received a report of property damage/vandalism. Someone is full of it.”
Chronic Problems
Lack of information has become a chronic problem that 911 providers in Wyoming are facing, McClain said. This isn’t the first time he’s had difficulty finding out the cause and scope of an outage.
“We struggle with getting updates with most providers, as they don’t want to admit fault or highlight inadequacies with their products/services,” he said.
Dispatching 911 calls wasn't an issue, McClain stressed. That occurs by radio and could happen regardless of cellphone coverage.
It was mainly an issue with receiving the emergency calls in the first place.
“People couldn’t get ahold of us for about three hours,” McClain said. “I posted a cellphone number (on Facebook) for people to call us, because we didn’t have any other way for people to get ahold of us.”
During that three-hour timeframe, McClain says Park County did get two 911 calls, which were dispatched with no problem.
After that, calls were rerouted for the outage areas. That put three counties' 911 calls through one dispatch center for a time, as Big Horn County’s dispatch services also went down at about 2 a.m., McClain said.
On Wednesday, things were better. But Big Horn County was expected to continue taking 911 calls for Park County all day with some repairs still ongoing, according to McClain.
Aging Systems
The situation highlights an ongoing crisis for 911 services in Wyoming.
“You’re starting to get a glimpse of how fragile some of these older networks are, like the phone company’s networks,” Worthen said. “We’ve spent a lot of time on redundancy, even including wireless redundancy for communities (we serve). That’s how we used to provide redundancy for Torrington before there was a second fiber route.”
McClain agreed that the situation illustrates a certain fragility for the state’s emergency services and stressed that this fragility is not confined to just Park County.
“We are working with 57-year-old technology to make 911 work in the state of Wyoming,” he said. “We are trying to work with the legislature to get funding so we can upgrade and advance to what we call next generation 911. But it’s an ongoing battle, and it’s something we’re going to continue to fight until we can find a funding mechanism for it.”
McClain said he and other 911 services in Wyoming have been meeting with the Joint Corporations Committee over the summer to draft legislation for a study to identify how best to modernize the system, as well as the costs involved.
“The current 911 system we have relies on copper trunks, fiber, microwave, etc.,” McClain said. “If the line is cut between Park County and Cheyenne, (which is) where the selective router is that routes all the 911 calls in the state, we go dead. And that’s what happened.”
Complex Systems Sometimes Delay Finding Problems
Issues with service to 911 centers are something the state legislature has been wrestling with for some time, Sen. Cale Case, R-Lander, told Cowboy State Daily.
Any 911 calls on the system are supposed to have higher priority than regular calls.
“That’s why you can sometimes get, you have so little signal, but it’ll say emergency calls only,” he said. “That’s partly networking, and partly because they don’t have a roaming agreement, maybe. But those can be actually routed in a different way. The digital identifier is picked off, and it’s given a priority and routed in an entirely different fashion.”
Systems, today, though, are far more complex than they used to be.
“(If) I’m calling a local number in Lander but I’m on my cellphone, that could be routed an unbelievably long, complicated routing,” he said. “That should have built-in redundancy in case something happens, so that it automatically switches a different way.
"But it could be switched and the light signals from the fiber optics processed in Casper, Cheyenne, even possibly out of state.”
The complexity sometimes creates delays in figuring out exactly where a problem is occurring, and who exactly is affected, Case added. And there are also programming issues sometimes on a system that has grown so complex even the phone companies themselves can’t always tell right away what’s happened.
Ownership Is Like A Nested Matryoshka Doll
One of the things the Wyoming legislature has been trying to do is increase penalties on carriers whenever 911 services are cut.
While there is already a similar federal law, it doesn’t kick in until 900,000 user minutes lack 911 service. That’s not a size that fits the Cowboy State.
“It became very complicated, because a carrier, and by carrier, I mean a particular phone company, say Verizon, may not even know that the traffic on their network is a 911 call,” Case said. “They just see data. They see zeroes and ones, and they may not even know they’re interrupting a 911 call, which is kind of crazy, but it got very complicated, very fast.”
Part of the complication is due to layers of nested leases, in Matryoshka-like doll fashion.
“So, there’s a fiber line,” Case said. “It belongs to somebody. Somebody’s leased that line, for what purpose? We don’t know whether it’s carrying images of photos or communications, because we don’t spy on it.”
Capacity leased by one company is often sold to other companies, too, which may further subdivide, adding to the opacity of the system.
While there are still issues to work out, Case said the newer systems are still better than what used to be available.
“It’s the cheapest best system in the world,” Case said. “We used to have to pay to like call Cheyenne, and it was more expensive per minute than calling Washington DC. Now I don’t care whether I’m calling Washington DC or across town.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
