The people of Warren County, Ohio, endured some rough weather in June as a 70 mph derecho whipped through this southwest county. A series of errors from CenturyLink kept 911 service inoperable for more than 15 hours. According to Stop the Cap!:
During the outage, callers initially heard nothing after dialing 911. Sometime later, someone at CenturyLink reprogrammed the equipment to forward calls from the Warren County 911 system in southwest Ohio to distant Geauga County’s 911 center in northeast Ohio near Cleveland, surprising operators.
Geauga County is located in the extreme northeast corner of Ohio, about as far away from Warren County as one can get without leaving the state. CenturyLink attributes the incident to a combination of inexperienced technicians, human error, and understaffing.
While accidents happen, the crux of this problem is in how CenturyLink responded to it.
Warren community leaders requested that CenturyLink meet with them to explain the fiasco, but CenturyLink was a no-show. Commissioner Dave Young, understandably upset, wants the county to turn over 911 services to another service provider.
“I want to switch sooner rather than later,” Young said. “The way this went down and the response we got from CenturyLink and now three weeks later we still don’t know the reason? We call our liaison and her solution to the 911 system being down is keep calling the 800 number. There’s something wrong there."
These massive carriers want to pretend they are the only ones capable of providing telecommunications services, but the reality is that many others do it better, including local governments and smaller, local private companies. The large carriers are a victim of their scale - no one knows what is going on.
