OMAHA, Neb. (KMTV) — Two cut fiber lines knocked out 911 calls to more than half of Nebraska's 911 centers on Thursday night, according to Lumen, the company contracted with Nebraska for 911 work.
One of the cuts was in Omaha and another was in Minneapolis, the Lumen spokesperson said late Friday afternoon. Earlier in the day, Lumen only referenced a single cut. Nebraska officials, too, were under the impression a single cut in Omaha resulted in the outage.
The outage lasted from 7:05 p.m. Thursday night to 5:30 a.m. Friday morning. It meant 911 voice calls could not go through, but texts could. Douglas County 911 was able to call back numbers that attempted to call on cell phones.
Redundancies should mean a single cut shouldn't result in an outage, Nebraska 911 Director Dave Sankey and Douglas County 911 officials told 3 News Now, before Lumen revealed late Friday afternoon that two cuts were the cause.
"If a line was cut, there should've been an alternate path," Sankey said. "And that's our question ... what happened? Why not?"
Sankey says he believes the line in Omaha was cut by a backhoe doing construction work. Lumen says each of the cuts happened from "two different third-party contractors not working with us."
The state public service commissioners, Sankey believes, will launch an investigation.
Because it happened as the Husker Football game was beginning, the lull in calls wasn't immediately odd, Douglas County 911 Director Kathy Allen said. But then came a text into 911. The texter said they received a busy signal when they called 911.
Neither Sankey nor Allen were aware of any significant harm that came because 911 was down.
"These guys (911 operators) do an amazing job of really pitching in and doing their best when something happens," Allen said.
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