Virginia 911 Directors Press Verizon on Derecho Failures
Several Virginia 911 directors met with Verizon officials Wednesday for a long closed-door meeting at the Alexandria Police Facility in northern Virginia. They discussed Verizon’s 911 failures during the June 29 derecho storm and reviewed a Verizon report on the outages at four 911 centers in northern Virginia as a result of two busted generators (CD Aug 15 p1). The telco remained contrite about the failure as the 911 directors emphasized the depth of the problem, participants told us just outside of the gathering and during interviews Tuesday.
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The June 29 outages amount to “the longest and largest outage in the 44-year history of 911,” said Steve Souder, 911 director of Fairfax County, Va. It will take time to work out all these difficulties with Verizon, he said. “They haven’t fixed the problem anywhere” yet, despite pledges and good meetings, he said.
Fairfax County received the “most severe” of the outages but not all, Souder said. He described failures across eight 911 centers in northern Virginia, all impacted in what he called “one degree or another,” affecting about 2 million people throughout an eight-hour period. Verizon’s report outlined the failures at four specific 911 centers in the region and referred to difficulties at an unspecified number of other centers. The failures are under investigation by the FCC, Virginia State Corporation Commission, Virginia governor’s office, Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments and Maryland Public Service Commission.
Verizon has been reviewing its facilities throughout the greater Washington, D.C., region over the last week and a half to ensure proper working order, a spokesman told the meeting. “We are not happy with this,” he said about Verizon’s failures. Directors from the Virginia jurisdictions of Alexandria, Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William and Stafford had contributed recommendations to Verizon after the derecho, the telco’s report said. The company responded to all of them with steps the telco can take moving forward. The spokesman described the goal of the 911 directors and Verizon as the same -- a functioning, safe 911 system.
The Verizon spokesman described “a lot of good give and take” in the private Wednesday meeting. He noted that backup power had come up as a concern in the conversations. Two generators failed and caused most of the post-derecho problems, the Verizon report confirmed. “It’s been very productive,” Souder told us two hours into the meeting. The 911 directors “reinforced our expectations” in a set of exchanges that have been “very interactive, very un-adversarial,” he said. The progress so far is a “common understanding” of what caused the June 29 failures, he said. Now comes the need for a system that “must be redundant, must be resilient enough” to face another derecho, he said.
Jurisdiction officials emphasized the need for Verizon to communicate better with both customers and the 911 centers. During the derecho, jurisdictions worked with one another to alleviate the failures. “We were taking calls from some neighboring jurisdictions and relaying them,” Alexandria Department of Emergency Communications Director Jo-Anne Munroe told us. It’s likely the 911 directors will continue to speak with Verizon and fine-tune strategic approaches beyond the Wednesday event, she said Tuesday. Meetings have happened between Verizon and the directors “on a regular basis,” she said. “We need to keep a dialogue open."
Cellular networks will need to play a part in any future 911 discussions, Souder and Munroe told us. They want multiple forms of alerts available to customers, they said. Souder called for a “holistic way” of looking at technology and how people might need to access 911 services. One challenge he outlined would be the practical dynamics of certain alerts systems, such as the texting solution Verizon proposed in the report, Souder said: How would customers sign up? How would that system coordinate with the jurisdictions? Munroe underscored the vital importance these centers serve: “We're the first contact when someone needs the services of the police or EMS."
The council of governments called for an investigation in July and formed the task force of 911 directors who met with Verizon Wednesday. The regional organization is unlikely to comment until the fall, once these different groups have completed their investigations, a spokesman said. Souder sees the multiple investigations as positive, he said. “We need to look at this thing as a national capital region,” he told us Tuesday. “The important thing is there’s openness and there’s candor.”