Dec 3, 2008 5:58 pm US/Eastern
911 Service Restored After Miami Server Shutdown
The Power Outage Hit Miami Police Headquarters Affecting Communications
MIAMI (CBS4) ―
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Miami police headquarters Wednesday morning faced phone and computer shutdowns after a server failure.
CBS
Miami's 911 emergency calls are running normally after a back-up facility kicked in when a power problem knocked the system at police headquarters out of service Wednesday.
The problem occurred just before 6:00 a.m. when an unexplained power surge affected a main computer server used by the city to control communications.
The server failure affected all computers used by city employees and some phone systems. It also knocked out computers and phone service at the Miami Police Department including the 911 system.
Calls to the city's emergency dispatchers were routed to Miami-Dade County's emergency dispatch communications center, then relayed to supervisors at the city of Miami.
"Those calls were dispatched by two methods," said Miami Police Chief John Timoney, "handheld portable radios or by cell phones."
Within 3 hours the city had set up and manned their emergency back up call center in a fire station in Coconut Grove.
The police chief said approximately ninety 911 calls had to be rerouted to the county, then relayed to the city from 5:52 a.m. to about 8:30 a.m.
"There were no major emergency phone calls of a, shall we say, deadly nature," said Timoney. "So we were quite fortunate in that regard."
Technicians finally restored full phone service and computer operations to all city personnel including the police department.
"We still don't know the origin of the problem or the damages to the transformer," said city manager Pete Hernandez.
Repair crews suspect the surge was caused by a faulty switch which failed to shut off an emergency generator after power levels dropped and then came back up.
"We need to make sure that this doesn't happen again," said Timoney.
The police chief has ordered a full investigation into the electrical and communications systems collapse.
Fire Chief William Bryson stressed that all calls for help were answered, and that back-up systems and plans worked as they were designed to.
"Typically, in many places, you would have had chaos," Bryson said.
The potential for chaos was lessened in today's failure, Chief Timoney said, because there was no broad emergency going on. Had there been a hurricane or major event occurring, Timoney said, the 911 failure could have made for large scale problems.
Miami spokesperson Kelly Penton said that with with computers on the fritz throughout city offices, some services were not available to citizens. Building permit applications, for instance, could not be processed because clerks were not able to access the computer servers, Penton said.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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