Emergency call centers across Wyoming experienced an outage Monday, which affected Natrona, Campbell, Fremont, Sheridan and Johnson Counties, as well as parts of Montana.
Lori Jackson is the communications supervisor for Casper’s Public Safety Communications Center. She said once CenturyLink notified the center, they were able to reroute all 911 calls to non-emergency lines in order to connect callers with a dispatcher.
Jackson said one of the challenges during an outage is the call center doesn’t always know when there is an issue, since calls are routed through Cheyenne.
“Particularly if it’s not something that’s local, just knowing that something is happening, that can be a really frustrating part on our end,” said Jackson. “We want to know immediately when something has happened, but if they haven’t even been able to identify yet to notify us, then obviously we can’t figure out that there’s a problem.”
Jackson said they were notified by CenturyLink shortly before 9am, but it was later discovered that the outage began around 7:30 that morning. The cause of the outage was an equipment malfunction in CenturyLink’s central office in Cheyenne. Services were expected to be restored this afternoon.
