Subscribe
Windstream Communications customers in eastern Nebraska have spent much of today without access to emergency 911 services, and many were without their own landlines as well. A switch failure in downtown Lincoln caused the outage impacting several counties starting at 7:45 Thursday morning.
Emergency services personnel were forced to rely on cell phones and amateur radio operators to process calls for emergency service, and several law enforcement personnel were staged in outage areas to assist with any calls for help.
Emergency dispatch centers were silent for much of today. Those attempting to call 911 received a busy signal.
“You know there’s people out there that are going to need help at some point, there always is, and they’re unable to get that help,” Cass County dispatcher Deb Thiessen told KETV in Omaha.
“It’s very rare there’s an outage of this type,” said Cass County Chief Deputy Brad Lahm.
[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KOLN-ABC Nebraska Windstream Suffers Major Outage 4-1-10.flv[/flv]
KOLN-TV and NTV report on today’s major Windstream outage. (5 minutes)
[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KETV Omaha Windstream Failure No April Fools Joke 4-1-10.flv[/flv]
KETV-TV in Omaha also covered the outage in their viewing area. (2 minutes)
Funny, this is the second major phone outage that has impacted Windstream customers in ten days, though the two outages are completely unrelated. The Tuesday before last an AT&T fiber was cut in central Texas, knocking out long-distance, cellular and some internet service in the entire Hill Country area. Cell phones didn’t work at all, since their T1 backhauls were all routed over that AT&T fiber link to switching stations in San Antonio, at least as far as I know. Landline customers in WIndstream and Verizon areas were able to call their own exchange, but no further. Some had difficulty… Read more »