Seattle leaders examine what went wrong, changes after 911 outage

SEATTLE — After a widespread CenturyLink outage took out 911 service throughout Washington state, Seattle city leaders are asking emergency experts for a breakdown of what went wrong, lessons learned and what the city needs to change should CenturyLink fail in the future.

Documents from Seattle police reveal there were actually two outages on Dec. 27. The first occurred at 12:46 a.m. and lasted for 32 minutes and the second was reported at 8:22 p.m. and lasted until 7:05 a.m. the next day.

In between the two outages, Seattle Police Department 911 officials reported intermittent outbound dialing issues and, later, that they could not connect to telephone language interpretation services.

>> RELATED: AG Ferguson asks Washingtonians affected by last month's 911 outage to share story

Seattle City Councilwoman Lorena Gonzalez said the city and county need to coordinate on how they notify the public during such an event.

“It can be really frustrating and scary for people if they need 911 services and they're being told by one agency to call a certain number and by a different agency to call a different number,” Gonzalez said.

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​“Did you see that happening?” KIRO 7 reporter Linzi Sheldon asked.

“We did see that happen and, in committee tomorrow, we'll see some examples,” Gonzalez said.

She said she wants to hear about opportunities for improvements in the system, as well. Some of that will come from CenturyLink when it releases its report on the incident but other insight may come from city and county emergency experts.

“What contributed to it, from CenturyLink's perspective, and is there something we should be doing at the city to address some of those gaps in CenturyLink's technology?” she asked.

After the outage, KIRO 7 spoke with a woman who was in Tukwila when she heard shots and tried to call for help.

“Once they stopped and we knew we were both OK, I called 911, and that's when we were getting a busy signal,” a woman who identified herself as Kati M. said.

>> RELATED: Nationwide CenturyLink outage impacts 911 service in parts of Washington

The King County Sheriff’s Office said it never got a call from the alarm company about a break-in at a Bank of America in SeaTac.

“The day that it actually happened was the same day 911 service was out nationwide, so we never got an alert from anybody—never got a call to 911 saying the alarm was going off,” Sgt. Ryan Abbott said.

“People wanted to know: How is this possible? Isn't there a backup system or some sort of redundancies that would prevent this from completely going out?” Linzi Sheldon asked Gonzalez.

“I think the redundancy that we addressed through this is: We now have the capability of allowing people to text 911,” Gonzalez said. “I think that it was really helpful for us to be able to have that system up and running. In fact, it was the only system that was up and running.”

The challenge, she said, is ensuring people know about Text-to-911, the service that just debuted in King County last month.

And on the horizon is a new state 911 provider that would replace CenturyLink.

King County emergency experts told KIRO 7 on Tuesday that a new network and provider are expected to be in place by the end of 2019.

CenturyLink has another week to provide its report on the outage, which is its second major 911 outage in the area in the last 4 1/2 years.

Cox Media Group