Nebraska’s Public Service Commission formally opened investigations into the state’s two largest telecommunications providers Tuesday over their role in separate disruptions to 911 services in Southeast Nebraska in late August and early September.
Commissioners voted 5-0 at their regular meeting Tuesday to launch the separate investigations into Lumen and Windstream, the providers at the center of the outages, one of which disrupted 911 phone service for nearly 60% of the 911 centers in Nebraska from the night of Aug. 31 to the morning of Sept. 1.
People are also reading…
“The commission takes 911 matters seriously,” said Tim Schram, the District 3 commissioner who represents Sarpy, Saunders and western Douglas counties on the body that regulates telecommunications carriers and oversees the State 911 department, among other duties.
“These investigations must provide answers,” Schram said at Tuesday’s meeting in downtown Lincoln, where the longtime commissioner thanked 911 dispatchers for working through the outages and the state’s news outlets for keeping the public updated.
The first of the outages — which were unrelated but happened within days of each other — came at around 7 p.m. Aug. 31 when a contractor cut a cable in the Omaha area owned by Lumen, leaving 41 of Nebraska’s 68 emergency communications centers unable to receive 911 calls, including Douglas and Sarpy counties, two of the state’s three most populous counties.
During the outage, which lasted about 12 hours, callers who dialed 911 in the affected area received a busy signal and calls weren’t delivered to 911 call centers, the Public Service Commission said in a written order opening its investigation into Lumen.
The second outage started at around 6:30 p.m. Sept. 2 after a water leak and subsequent fire inside Windstream’s electrical control room the night before had shut off commercial power to the building, leaving an on-site generator to take over supporting the three switches in the provider’s Lincoln facility, according to a Windstream spokesman.
That generator failed sometime Sept. 2, forcing Windstream to resort to batteries to operate the three switches housed in the facility.
But the batteries dropped to “dangerously low voltage levels” Saturday evening, a spokesman said, prompting Windstream to shut down one of the three switches, interrupting services for customers that included at least four 911 service operators.
During the outage, calls to the affected 911 centers — 18 of the 20 centers connected to the Windstream system — were delivered either sporadically or not at all, the commission said in a written order opening a separate investigation into Windstream.
“Our initial question is: what happened in this case?” Dave Sankey, the director of the state 911 Department, said last week. “Where was the redundancy? Where was the diversity?”
The commission’s probe of the Lumen outage will focus on the cause of the outage and why it resulted in the loss of 911 service “to such a large area of Nebraska,” according to the order launching the investigation.
Commissioners are seeking “both an explanation of why the redundancy required of Lumen failed in this instance and a solution to prevent this from happening again,” according to the order.
The investigation into Windstream, meanwhile, will in part examine why a fire and loss of electrical power at a single Windstream facility resulted in a loss of 911 service “to a large portion of southeast Nebraska,” according to the written order.
The commission is also seeking the same explanation from Windstream that is is from Lumen: Why did required redundancies fail and how can future failure be prevented?
In both cases, investigators will also explore whether customers of each provider — including the 911 centers they serve — received timely notification of the outages.
Scott Morris, a spokesman for Windstream, said Tuesday that the Arkansas-based telecommunications company stands “ready to engage constructively with the Nebraska Public Service Commission as it undertakes the” investigation.
“We are committed to providing robust, reliable communications services to our customers, as technology continues to transform and reshape the way Nebraskans access economic opportunities, educational resources, medical care and entertainment,” Morris said in an email
Windstream has previously declined to answer specific questions about the service outage as the company conducts its own internal review of the incident.
Representatives for Lumen did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Tuesday.
This is a developing story. Stay with JournalStar.com for updates.
Top Journal Star photos for August 2023
Reach the writer at 402-473-7223 or awegley@journalstar.com. On Twitter @andrewwegley