Thursday, December 4, 2008
All systems back up at Miami Police Headquarters after outage
COCONUT GROVE, Fla. (WSVN) -- Everything is back to normal at the City of Miami Police Headquarters and City Hall after a power outage knocked out phone lines, computers and 911 almost all day Wednesday.
Miami Police Chief John Timoney said the power went down at Headquarters in Coconut Grove at around 5:50 a.m. Wednesday, bringing the phone system off line. Calls to 911 were re-routed through the emergency phone system in Doral and then back to the Grove building.
Timoney, along with the city manager and the fire chief, assured the public that no 911 calls were missed during a press conference Wednesday morning. Timoney said 911 operators received 70 to 90 calls during the down time, between the hours of 5:52 and 8:30 in the morning, before the 911 system was brought back up and running on all three levels.
Also affected by the outage were communications from the radio dispatch center. By 8:30 a.m., that was also back on-line. The outage also made computers and email unavailable at Miami City Hall for the entire day. Everything was back to normal by 5 p.m.
The outage caused a 15 to 20 minute lag period before the connection to the Coconut Grove facility started receiving 911 calls again. During that time, emergency operators in Miami-Dade took all 911 calls and none of the City of Miami 911 calls were missed. "To the public it was seamless," said City Manager Pete Hernandez.
The police chief said several factors made the situation easier to control. "We were fortunate for a variety of reasons," Timoney said. "One, today, at the police department, on Wednesday, is an overlap day, so there were twice as many police officers available. Similarly, there were twice as many civilian personnel. We were also fortunate in that it happened just before the 6 a.m. shift."
Timoney said the department does not know how or why the power went out and added that an investigation will occur.
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