9-1-1 CALL RECEIVING/DISPATCH DOWN ON 01/13/2015. STARK EMA DIRECTOR SAYS "AT&T TO BLAME!"

UPDATED:  11:00 AM

VIDEO

STARK EMA DIRECTOR

TIM WARSTLER

GOING TO DIG FOR ANSWERS

ON

AT&T

9-1-1

BACKUP/REDUNDANCY FAILURE
===========================
NOVEMBER, 2013
VIDEO
ON
OCTOBER 6, 2013
9-1-1 PROBLEM

A second AT&T problem involving Stark Countians ability to use 9-1-1 emergency call receiving and dispatch services?

Back on October 6, 2013 (LINK to prior SCPR blog) there was an issue as to who was at fault on a glitch which disabled Stark County citizens to have their emergency calls received by Stark County's 9-1-1 entities, to wit:

And here is a video from the November 25, 2013 Q&A session which included AT&T officials as to who was at fault.



January 13, 2015 comes and perhaps it is "deja vu, all over again?"

A Stark Countian would not want to have any sort of emergency Tuesday evening into the early hours of Wednesday morning because the county's 9-1-1 system was unable to receive calls and, as the SCPR understands the situation, would be callers were unable to make calls.

One thing that the current Stark County commissioners do that in the SCPR's experience previous boards of commissioners did not do is to bring "in the know" county officials into the commissioners' meeting room for a public Q&A on the problem and solutions to the problem.

And that is exactly what they did yesterday in bringing Stark County Director of the Emergency Management Agency (LINK) into yesterday's regular commissioners' weekly meeting.

The problem was not just limited to 9-1-1 but was spread throughout a 11 state AT&T served area according to Warstler.

Media reports indicate that AT&T is blaming a burst steam pipe in the Akron area for the problem.

But as far as Warstler is concerned, having a problem like AT&T did is one thing, but is another when Stark County government paid for "back up/redundancies" did not kick in to give citizens with need to access the county's emergency services the ability to do so.

A main mission of the SCPR is to make Stark County government at all levels accountable.

Stark Countians should be pleased to see the commissioners and Director Warstler working hard to get answers "from the 'profit-making private sector" for the failure of taxpayer paid for services to function when needed.

Any government unit or private sector service can have a problem.

But it has to be "unacceptable" when government pays (meaning the taxpayers) the private sector for backups and redundancies and then they do not work when needed.

Here is the full video of Warstler's presentation to commissioners and answers to questions posed by The Stark County Political Report.



A service that the commissioners provide through Warstler's office, is to notify Stark Countians when there is a 9-1-1 outage.

The SCPR encourages citizens to avail themselves of this service.  Signing up can be done at this LINK.

Notification takes places through text messages and e-mails.

On its website (LINK, same as above), Stark's EMA describes the notification process thusly:

Again, The Report encourages readers of the SCPR to sign up.