Vermont, Washington 911 Outage Investigations Highlight Larger Issues, Observers Say

The Vermont DPS was “already going to investigate certain of [FairPoint’s] service quality metrics that they had not been meeting, but now another part of this investigation will be how and why did this 911 outage occur,” said DPS Telecom Division Director Jim Porter. DPS said it received 458 complaints about FairPoint’s service in Vermont between July and the end of November, with the number spiking after more than 1,700 of its workers in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont went on strike in October. The investigation's 911 outage component will include questions about whether FairPoint included an appropriate redundancy route for the 911 network and whether the system’s engineering was correct, Porter said. The Vermont PSB plans a prehearing conference on its FairPoint investigation at 3 p.m. Tuesday at the PSB’s Montpelier headquarters. A FairPoint spokeswoman said the telco will cooperate with the investigation.

The Vermont E911 Board is also continuing to investigate the Nov. 28 outage, though its investigation will focus on communications issues during the outage, including determining why FairPoint and Intrado delayed providing the board with the number of people whose 911 calls failed to reach the PSAPs, said board Executive Director David Tucker. “We think we understand what happened, but we have some concerns nonetheless.” FairPoint and 911-infrastructure company Intrado reported 97 calls that failed to reach Vermont public safety answering points (PSAPs) because of the outage. FairPoint and Intrado didn’t begin providing that information to the E911 Board until 24 hours after the outage began, Tucker said. FairPoint began operating the Vermont 911 system last month but Intrado is still transitioning out some of some operational functions.

“We understand based on what we’ve been told that the outage itself wasn’t anybody’s fault, that there was storm-related damage that impacted the main fiber connection that 911 calls are routed on as well as a secondary path,” Tucker said. “We’re doing our due diligence and looking at ways that the board can improve the communication when something like this happens.” The E911 Board has determined that none of the callers who experienced failed connections to PSAPs had an emergency made worse because of delays caused by the outage, Tucker said. Intrado didn’t comment.

The UTC has no statutory deadline for acting on its staff’s report on the April 10 multistate outage, but if the commission determines the report has merit, its next step would be to issue a complaint against CenturyLink, which manages the state’s 911 system, and start formal hearing proceedings, a spokeswoman said. The staff report urged the UTC to levy up to $2.93 million in financial penalties against CenturyLink, which manages Washington’s 911 system, for violating UTC rules.

FCC v. UTC Reports

UTC's staff report went beyond an FCC report in leveling criticisms.

The FCC’s October report on the outage determined the cause was a failure at an Intrado call routing center in Colorado, but the Washington UTC staff believes CenturyLink is responsible for Intrado’s role in the outage plus had its own role because it had subcontracted some of its 911 infrastructure role to Intrado, the UTC spokeswoman said. The staff report found CenturyLink had amassed more than 11,700 violations of UTC rules, including failing to automatically re-route 911 calls away from Intrado’s Colorado center, failing to manage the technical 911 system and failing to promptly notify PSAPs about the outage. A CenturyLink spokeswoman referred us to an earlier statement from the telco disputing the “punitive nature” of the UTC report.

State regulators and the FCC have a prerogative to seek financial penalties for 911 outages, but “the mitigating variable is if there is a demonstration of repeated offenses,” said National Emergency Number Association CEO Brian Fontes. “If this type of behavior has existed before, and if it has, has that company implemented the appropriate actions to protect against it happening again?” The FCC hasn’t yet publicly proposed any financial penalties against CenturyLink, Intrado or other providers involved in the April 10 outage.

Two UTC commissioners have participated in FCC proceedings on 911 since the April 10 outage, and the FCC has provided “extensive” outreach to all the affected states, which shows the commission is “very serious about coordinating action” with states, said NARUC General Counsel Brad Ramsay. There’s “no question” that states should retain jurisdiction over 911 as a “intrastate” and “severable” transaction under the Communications Act, and that coordinated state-federal action “can only increase incentives for providers to improve the reliability of these critical systems,” Ramsay said. UTC staff efforts “underscore the importance of the FCC and states working closely together to promote reliable 911 service as technology evolves,” an FCC spokeswoman said.

Other States

Other states aren't now taking action on the multistate 911 outage. CenturyLink manages 911 service in two of the affected states -- Minnesota and North Carolina. Spokesmen for the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC) and the North Carolina Utilities Commission separately said they weren’t planning to investigate. The Florida Public Service Commission (PSC) no longer has statutory authority over 911 service but its staff contacted the three counties affected by the outage, all of which contracted with Intrado, a spokeswoman said. The Pennsylvania PUC doesn’t plan to investigate the April 10 outage either, a spokesman said.

The April 28 outage shows that “when we have third parties provisioning 911 services, those third parties may in fact be beyond the borders of any one state,” Fontes said. “In what was traditionally a very local or state regulatory issue, there is currently a void as to the oversight for interstate provisioning of 911 services. If nothing else, this is an opportunity for state regulators and federal regulators to discuss how the interstate aspects of provisioning 911 services will be overseen.” Outages like the April 28 outage or the June 2012 derecho are also an opportunities for companies to “do a thorough review of their processes to ensure that situations like this will be unlikely to happen again,” Fontes said.

“Sunny day” 911 outages like the April 10 outage “aren’t acceptable,” so the UTC staff report and FCC report will help prevent similar issues from occurring in the future, said National Association of State 911 Administrators Director Evelyn Bailey. “The world that 911 finds itself in now is very different from the world it found itself in 10 years ago.”