911 dispatchers in Delaware County recall "sense of helplessness" during Pennsylvania outage
The mission in every 911 center is to get people who are in distress help as quickly as possible. Outages across Pennsylvania on Friday shook confidence about the system's integrity, and people inside the Delaware County 911 call center are upset about it.
Steve Castellano said outages Friday afternoon, when a still-unknown number of people were unable to get through to 911, were chaotic.
"Two, three, four, five minutes of a lull where there was no calls coming in at all," Castellano said. "Followed by influxes of 15 or 20 911 calls coming in at the same time."
Castellano said this picture shows the extent of the problem across Pennsylvania, with reds and purples signaling major trouble.
"We've got to do something. We're dead in the water," Ed Beebe, director of Delaware County's 911 center, said.
"We're not getting 911 calls. We know at 3 o'clock on a Friday afternoon, we generally know what our call volume is, and we are sitting there receiving nothing. There's a sense of helplessness. We know we should be receiving calls, and we're not."
Castellano said that, while information on potentially hundreds of calls wasn't available, they defaulted to a newer and completely separate program, allowing them to see callers' phone numbers. Workers then called or texted the number back to identify the emergency.
"What we were actually able to see happening was 911 calls not presenting in the 911 system, but still showing up on our AI portals," Castellano said. "We were able to reverse text those folks as the calls were popping up."
Dr. Monica Taylor, chairperson of Delaware County Council, expressed gratitude to 911 workers for their quick response in navigating the outage. She awaits the outcome of the state's investigation.
"Hopefully, they're able to give us an idea of why it happened," Taylor said, "and remedy how we can prevent it from happening again."
Officials said they remain alarmed at how quickly the statewide call delivery system went down.
"I've been doing this for 40 years. When you can't answer a 911 call and you're sitting there in the room, it's silenced at 3 o'clock on a Friday, as an individual, you wonder what you're missing," Beebe said. "It's a helpless feeling, Joe. The room is quiet when you know the phone should be ringing off the hook."
The state said it's investigating and that it would take several days to figure out what went wrong.
