Yesterday, for a short time at about 11:11 a.m., if you called 9-1-1 in Arlington Heights and surrounding communities, you wouldn’t get an answer until a backup plan was immediately put in place. Northwest Central Dispatch System (NWCDS) quickly established their backup plan that diverts calls to the Cook County Sheriff dispatch center. Cook County Sheriff staff answered, and then relayed information to police desks or to the Northwest Central Dispatch center — causing several seconds delays to emergency calls being handled during the outage that lasted just over an hour. Fortunately no serious harm occurred during emergency calls that were managed during the outage.
A few older hardline inside lines still worked at NWCDS, but the normal 9-1-1 phone lines, and phone lines that fire stations and police desk staff use to call Northwest Central Dispatch did not work. Staff worked hard to avoid interruptions or delays in service.
Phones were back up an running normally at about 12:15 p.m. Tuesday.
Arlington Heights, Buffalo Grove, Elk Grove Village, Hoffman Estates, Mount Prospect, Prospect Heights Police only, Rolling Meadows, Schaumburg, and Streamwood were affected by the outage.
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