Tuesday night around 7:30, the lights went out. Lincoln's 911 Center lost power, due to a badly corroded breaker box far away at the opposite end of the County-City Building, down in an underground vault where the building's electrical panels live. We ran on backup battery power for a while, but when it became apparent that the fix was days, rather than minutes, the staff hit the ejection button and moved to the back-up center.
Parts are being overnighted, and we hope to be back in business at the main center today or tomorrow. We are fortunate to have a back-up center, and also fortunate that it is regularly exercised. This little crisis was not without its trials and tribulations, but the public would not even notice the difference. In fact, we had previously planned on moving to the lifeboat for the later half of the week as part of a normal exercising of the back-up site, and in order to take care of carpet cleaning and other maintenance at the main site.
Probably the biggest impact of the fail-over was the loss of connectivity between the computer-aided dispatch system and the police and fire records systems. The 911 Center's computer systems feed data to the police and fire systems, and without those links, things get a little interesting--sort of like 1974. Not a bad thing at all for highly-computerized enterprises to maintain their practice at operating in an unplugged condition from time-to-time as part of their emergency preparedness planning and exercising.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
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7 comments:
In spite of the problems, you were all still there for us. Thank you for overcoming what could have been a real nightmare. You are the BEST!
Rumor has it that the first 10 seconds of this video resemble the call and dispatch center during the late troubles. You probably didn't have that jazzy, old-school conveyor for your cards though.
For any of you that like reading about possible apocalyptic events check out a copy of ONE SECOND AFTER by WILLIAM R. FORSTCHEN. Some of our top Generals think it is a legitimate possibility. On an extremely small scale the 9/11 power outage could be similar to the events in the book. Hopefully it is a work of fiction, not prophecy.
Gun Nut
Computers are great until the power goes out. We'll see how the nerds survive then.
I've been running without electricity for a long time.
3:35,
I grew up with that conveyor in the Comm Center. Alas, though, it's gone the way of the pneumatic tubes....
Anonymous 3:35 pm: How funny!!!
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