Oakland’s 911 system is back up and running following the restoration of the city’s phone service Friday morning after the entire emergency dispatch system for police and fire services went offline Wednesday evening.
Oakland Police Chief James Beere said Thursday morning on social media that the department’s computer-aided dispatch system froze and displayed an error message at about 8:30 p.m. Wednesday.
“Dispatchers then tried both emergency and non-emergency lines and discovered there was no service to all phone lines, internet, or CAD,” Beere said in a video message.
The city’s IT teams worked with AT&T to get the computer-aided system and internet back online Thursday evening, but repairs to the phone lines took until Friday morning to complete. During the outage, 911 calls were routed through the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office while OPD dispatchers were relocated to the Oakland Fire Department Dispatch Center and the sheriff’s dispatch center. The Fire Department’s dispatchers were able to handle all fire and medical calls for service and the county was answering 911 calls and relaying information to OPD dispatchers stationed at the Fire Department.
The city has contingency plans for just such a situation but “unfortunately both of the initial fallback plans were compromised last night,” Beere said Thursday.
Police said somebody damaged AT&T fiber optic cables in an apparent copper wire theft. Police officials had not announced any arrests in the copper wire theft as of Friday.
“Earlier this morning, we did confirm that there was damage to not just the fiber optics, but also to the copper lines,” Beere said at a news conference Thursday afternoon. “We had already treated it as an investigation, as a criminal act.”
Beere said in his almost 30 years with the department he’s never seen the optic lines go out and the phones being disconnected in a way that impacted the fire department system, as well.
“It was very concerning,” he said.
Beere said he has spoken with Oakland Fire Department Chief Damon Covington about “exploring new technology that’s not reliant on an infrastructure with lines that are running across the ground, but also more up to speed on what we see as the best practice to continue communications in the region.”