911 service stops working for 20 minutes

By Curtis Lum
Advertiser Staff Writer

The state's 911 emergency service was down for about 20 minutes yesterday morning and only limited service was available for more than six hours after phone operations were switched to a backup system.

People who dialed 911 from about 10:30 to 10:50 a.m. got busy signals or no response, said Honolulu Police Capt. Frank Fujii. Once the problem was detected, a backup system kicked in, but it did not include the enhanced feature that shows a caller's phone number and address, Fujii said.

"The importance of enhanced 911 is to service emergency needs when the person can't let us know where he or she is at," Fujii said. "In a medical emergency sometimes a person can't speak, or if an adult can't call, a child might call."

Fujii, along with representatives from the Honolulu Fire Department and Emergency Medical Services, reported no significant problems. The system was up and running at 5:02 p.m.

Fujii said he did not know how many calls were missed on O'ahu during the down time. About 3,000 calls for service are made each day, but Fujii said the failure occurred during a "relatively slow time for us."

Fire Capt. Kenison Tejada said from 10 to 15 seconds may have been added to HFD's response time because addresses had to be manually typed.

"There was no noticeable interruption for us," Tejada said.

Patty Dukes, EMS chief, said her agency was not aware of any problems after the system failed.

"It looks like we didn't miss anything," Dukes said.

The 911 service is provided by Verizon Hawai'i and the cause of the failure is under investigation, said Ann Nishida, Verizon spokeswoman.

Nishida said: "We've always had safeguards in place to prevent situations like this, but you have the human element and human error. But at this time it would be premature to comment further until a full investigation can be conducted."