By Mindy Ragan Wood
Staff Writer
After the Sunday night storms raged through Canadian County, Piedmont city officials claim a phone outage put its residents at risk.
City Manager Jason Orr said the city’s AT&T phone system was not working for two days.
“We’ve been completely out of service for two days now,” Orr said Tuesday. “We’ve been having problems for months. People have tried to call emergency services and gotten a busy signal, or they can’t hear them (dispatch) or dispatch can’t hear anything.”
Dispatcher Michele Jobe said she was using her cell phone Tuesday to field calls, which slowed down her ability to dispatch emergency services.
Jobe complained the problem has been ongoing for months. She has had to give callers the direct number to dispatch instead of calling through 911. She said her worst fears were realized last week someone who needed an ambulance couldn’t hear her.
“I said, ‘what is the address of your emergency?’ and it was silence. I said it again and nothing. I had to tell them to hang up and call me right back. ‘If you can hear me, call back.’ She called back, I jotted her number down and called her. She needed an ambulance,” Jobe said. “That (call) ended up not being our jurisdiction, but what if that had been a child who happened to dial 911 correctly but couldn’t call me back (directly)?”
Deputy Police Chief Sterling Markel said phone issues slow down their response times.
“We’re losing time and when it’s a medical emergency, seconds count,” he said.
Jobe said she did put in a request for repair in March which generated a ticket.
“It’s still unresolved,” she said. “We are emergency services and we should be online before anyone else in the city. It used to be that I could call them and tell them it’s for emergency service and it would be fixed in a day. Submitting a ticket takes time. I call the person who is over our account and she tells me that this is a different issue and I can’t help you with that. We’re not being put at the top of the priority list,” she said.
Jobe said the city’s communication problems were also aggravated by the state’s law enforcement communication system which was also down Tuesday across the state. The internet service was not operating well enough to run programs for police and fire and emails were received sporadically.
By late Tuesday afternoon phone service was restored, but Orr is uneasy about the reliability of the service.
“They sent out a technician and they had it fixed in minutes,” he said. “He talked to us about updating some of our equipment and that may help. As far as the past two days, all that needed to be done was the resetting of some equipment. Without the ability to receive emergency phone calls because a technician didn’t come out to reset the equipment…I feel like it is inexcusable. This isn’t a residential issue. There could have been lives at stake and I feel like there should have been more of a priority on a city that provides emergency services.”
Fire Chief Andy Logan is also the city’s emergency management director. He said the problems always seemed to get fixed for a while.
“We’ve been working with AT&T but about the time everyone is under the impression everything is repaired, there’s problems again. We’re going to get our IT team, AT&T’s IT team and get to the root of the issue so we can have some reliable phone service,” he said.
AT&T External Affairs Sandra Robinette said she had been on the phone with city officials Tuesday to resolve the outage but referred the Piedmont Gazette to spokesman Dale Ingram for further comment.
“Wireline service was restored for the City of Piedmont municipal offices that were affected when equipment lost power in Sunday’s storm,” Ingram wrote in an email. “We’ve been working closely with city officials to resolve any issues and are committed to providing the city with the best possible experience.”
