Emergency management services are back up and working

RAPID CITY, S.D. (KOTA) - On Tuesday, September 19, the emergency management call center in Campbell County, Wyoming went down, meaning people were unable to get in touch with 911 dispatchers.

The communication center went down around three Tuesday morning, meaning both the Campbell County sheriff’s office and Gillette police department were unable to receive calls. Newcastle and Casper started having issues soon after as well. The county ended up having 16,000 phone lines down within Campbell County, including courthouse, school district, and hospital lines.

“Well, the problem we had is, when you call 911 you expect someone to answer the phone, and in this case, it wasn’t working. When we sent out the county-wide notice, we gave 3 phone numbers, the numbers we put out to the public were cell phones. We took those in, gave them to the dispatchers, so if you called one of those numbers, you got a dispatcher and then she was able to handle it the rest of the way,” said David King, Campbell County emergency management coordinator.

The issue ended up getting resolved around three in the afternoon, but King said that a meeting would be held either later this week or next week to review the incident and come up with a plan so they are prepared if this happens again.

Copyright 2023 KOTA. All rights reserved.