Nebraska PSC holds first hearing on 911 outages

LINCOLN, Neb. (WOWT) – During a hearing Thursday, Windstream’s operations president told the Nebraska Public Service Commission a third-party contractor accidentally cut the water line while installing a new natural gas line during the week of Aug. 28.

“As a result of this line cut, water leaked into Windstream’s transformer room located in the office basement,” Brad Hedrick said. “This caused a fire and small explosion, which resulted in a short to the ground wire on the main AC busbar, ultimately leading to the loss of commercial power.”

Hedrick said by Sept. 2, the backup generator the site switched over to failed, leading them to rely on backup batteries. After six hours, the batteries got critically low.

“Windstream’s operations and engineering team made the difficult decision to shut down one of the switches in an attempt to preserve power for the other two switches,” he said. “By also proactively shutting down a switch, Windstream was able to avoid an equipment crash, which would have resulted in nearly catastrophic failures for the switch and greatly extended the outage duration.”

That led to a shutdown of service in southeast Nebraska for around four-and-a-half hours. People weren’t able to make 911 calls during that time.

Hedrick told the Public Service Commission that Windstream has taken steps to address the issues that occurred.

“Windstream’s facilities management vendor, at Windstream’s direction, has since established a contract with NMC Cat located here in Lincoln. Should a backup megawatt generator be required in the future, we now have one just down the road.”

However, state 911 director David Sankey said services in the southeast part of the state were also experiencing disruptions in late November, causing 911 calls to fail for around an hour.

“Windstream has determined that the failure was the result of a manufacturer bug that prevented the meta switch from recovering automatically,” Hedrick said.

Windstream said it has since restored the alarms on devices to ensure timely reports for future outages, and that it’s updating the network route so traffic would follow an alternate path if something like this happens again.

Several 911 centers also experienced outages in September that the Public Service Commission said had to do with service interruptions with telecommunications provider Lumen. There will be a separate hearing on that Jan. 4.

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