East Baton Rouge Parish's 911 system suffered communications problems for a third consecutive day Monday, and the head of the agency overseeing it said there are thousands of places where the network could be out of sync.
Crews from AT&T were working to nail down the cause, the city-parish said, and anyone who loses their connection on an emergency call should try 911 again right away. The caller's location is logging properly, but sometimes they may have additional critical information.
“People are trying to give details about the issue and then the call drops," said Jim Verlander, director of the East Baton Rouge Parish Communications District. "We already have a location and a phone number, so as long as they’re able to get the words ‘fire’, ‘medical’ or ‘police’ out of their mouth at some point in time, we can get the proper response heading towards them."
The city-parish reported trouble initially on Saturday and switched to a backup system, but said Sunday said there were more problems. AT&T was working to find out the source of the problem.
"They’re putting special tracers on all of our different trunk lines, which is the way that the 911 calls come in and they’re still doing their testing to figure out exactly where this issue is coming from," Verlander said.
Baton Rouge Police Department spokesman Sgt. L'Jean McKneely said the department was told about the problem during the weekend and said people could call the agency's non-emergency number if they have persistent problems with 911. BRPD can be reached at (225) 389-2000.
"We were made aware of the issues while they've been trying to fix the problem," he said. "We've been directing people (directly) to us when we found out what happened."
Verlander, who called AT&T the "gatekeepers of 911" calls, said the phone company had alleviated some of the problems since Saturday.
"They’ve been working with us and pulling out all the stops to get everybody that they can possibly have on this because this is huge," he said. "One dropped call is too many and we’ve had numerous, but again, since we’ve swapped to the backup system Saturday night, it seems to have mitigated our dropped calls issue.”
However, identifying what the problem is, Verlander said, can be difficult because within the routing equipment, there are many places to check.
“There’s all this very special routing that has to happen and is in place, but it has literally thousands of pieces of equipment," he said. "So most of the time they know that, if it’s one particular issue, it’ll be this one piece of equipment and they can go in there and do a software update, a reboot or replace that piece of equipment and it’s good to go. But they’re having difficulty identifying what is causing this issue."
Verlander said that most calls are going through, the trouble is that calls are dropping far too often and too quickly.
With an estimated 200,000 people around the LSU campus on Saturday for activities related to the LSU vs. Southern football game, the large crowds added another layer to fixing communications among parish residents and emergency services. Some problems Saturday could have been from a routine volume issue.
"When you dial 911, your phone number and location come up also, but sometimes when people were calling, the call might fail on their end and that goes back to a regular issue," Verlander said. "When people call from a really rural location or busy place or something, the call is not even hitting the network because of their location."
According to Verlander, the parish is moving towards implementing a new 911 system later in December. It's called "Next Generation Advanced 911" that has enhanced features.
He said emergency crews will roll out with the best information they have, if call drops.
“Continue dialing 911 if it’s an emergency, call back if a call is to drop and know that we are responding," he said. "Just because the call dropped, doesn’t mean that we’re not responding.”