— by Lin McNulty —
CenturyLink experienced outages with some 911 lines across the country on Thursday night and into Friday morning, affecting our San Juan County 911 service.
Locally, 911 service was restored in San Juan County at 3:20 a.m. having been out for several hours. With ongoing national issues around the 911 system, remember that if 911 doesn’t work for you in an emergency, 360-378-4141 is the alternate number to San Juan County Dispatch.
It is to be expected that the FCC will be further investigating the outage. CenturyLink 911 lines were previously out of service — including our San Juan County lines — in early April 2014. At that time, CenturyLink placed the blame on a technical error by a third-party vendor.
And why did our cell phone alarm wake us at midnight to tell us not to dial 911? Maybe I just don’t understand……