Emergency response lines fail three times in past few weeks

Hooksett Editor — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:06:00 GMT

BY JENN McDOWELL

Hooksett was without emergency response lines three times over the past few weeks, and the town is going to meet with the line carrier, One Communications, to discuss the glitches.

The outages happened on June 25, June 28 and July 11, said Hooksett police Capt. Jon Daigle, resulting in periods of about an hour in which the Hooksett Police Department could not get any incoming emergency calls.

“It’s an awful long time to go without emergency lines,” Daigle said, adding there’s no way of knowing whether any emergency calls went unanswered until someone calls the station to complain about a missed call, which hasn’t happened yet.

A One Communications representative told police the problem resulted from a switch issue, and as far as anyone knows, the problem is now fixed.

The problems were discovered when officers tried to call in to dispatch from the road, and the lines were dead, hindering communications with Merrimack County Sheriff’s Department and Concord 911 dispatch. One Communications provides an 800 number, Daigle said, in such situations.

Police called that number and got a message that all carrier lines were busy, and there were no other back-up numbers to call, Daigle said.

“We waited on hold for like almost an hour, and then get a service tech representative,” Daigle said, adding the company is supposed to have all their service information on file, but was asking questions they should have already had answers to. This is not the first time the Police Department has experienced issues with One Communications, Daigle said.

When the entire town switched to One Communications from Verizon in 2006, the lines were down for three days, Daigle said.

Police were told that there was no available service technician to respond and fix the problem.

A service technician who finally responded then blamed the problem on Verizon, who sent technicians out twice and said the problem was One Communications. “For three days, all they did was blame Verizon. The county had our phones for three days,” Daigle said.

One Communications finally fixed the issue and said the problem was a worn switch. Verizon actually ended up billing One Communications for the time they spent trying to figure out the problem in Hooksett, Daigle said.

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Emergency response lines fail three times in past few weeks