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(Updated)
It sounds like an emergency nightmare for emergency officials and the public. The 9-1-1 emergency phone lines going down. Police say that’s what happened in Hamilton last night.
Around ten o’clock, Hamilton police contacted the media and tweeted the public telling everyone if they had an emergency they should call a different number.
But today, police say it was business a usual and the service was able to track 9-1-1 calls.
To be clear, the 9-1-1 lines that were impacted for about an hour has been restored. So if you have an emergency you should call 9-1-1.
But all day we’ve been looking for answers into exactly what happened last night — because a lot of people were concerned then — and still are today.
Police are saying that while the 9-1-1 system went down last night, they were still able to properly respond to all the calls they received. And while the emergency service is back up and running, there are still a lot of questions which remain with answers seeming few and far between as to what exactly happened.
Cst. Debbie McGreal-Dinning, Hamilton Police: “Those calls continued to come in, it was business as usual, and we were able to get those officers out to those emergencies.”
Today, the Hamilton Police Service is playing down a one hour disruption to its 9-1-1 system. But last night, it was a different story with a different tone.
A tweet was sent out at around 10 pm during a scheduled electrical upgrade saying 9-1-1 lines are down and asking the public to call this number instead of 9-1-1.
Cst. McGreal-Dinning: “We were trying to be pro-active. The intent was not to cause any panic at all for citizens.”
With 9-1-1 lines down, callers were re-routed to the administrative line. but when asked why there wasn’t a clear backup system to make sure operations ran smoothly, there was some confusion.
CHCH Reporter Miranda Anthistle: “Why is there not a backup plan though, so if something does get disrupted, that the media doesn’t have to be alerted to the fact that the phone lines are down, why isn’t there a back up?” Cst. McGreal-Dinning “I don’t know what the answers are to these.”
Police later went on to explain that there is a contingency plan that was in place which worked last night, but were reluctant to go into details.
Cst. McGreal-Dinning: “I can’t speak to specifics of anything being improved. I know that we’ve had a contingency plan for years, it is something that does work, and if there was a time lapse it was a very minute period of time and luckily last night nothing happened.”
Hamilton Fire and EMS did confirm that their operations were not impacted by the disruption to 9-1-1 last night. The Ministry of Health says calls were re-routed and directed to ambulance services as normal with no delays to dispatching in the city. But Nick, you were here in the newsroom last night and I know it may not have seemed that way.
Nick Dixon: There did seem to be a lot of urgency last night when police officials were calling the newsroom and asking us to get the message about the 9-1-1 outage out to our viewers in Hamilton — as well as some heavy emphasis on the phone number police wanted people to dial instead. So today’s tone comes as surprise to me as the person who took the calls and heard how it was being handed initially last night.
Miranda: Police say their main objective was to inform citizens as much as they could in the event something were to happen so that they still trusted the fact that Hamilton police were going to respond to any emergency.
