Pennsylvania County Apologizes for 911 Glitch

Allegheny County Emergency Services Chief Bob Full yesterday apologized to county citizens for the partial failure of the 911 system on Wednesday and said officials are still looking into why it happened.

He also acknowledged that county police and the medical examiner's office are investigating the death of a baby in Stowe and whether the 911 failure contributed to it in any way.

"I want to apologize for the system letting the public down. Any failure is unacceptable," he said yesterday afternoon at the 911 center in Point Breeze. "We are at the mercy of technology at times."

Mr. Full said county officials, technicians from the vendor, Embarq Corp., formerly Sprint, and consultants had identified the cause -- a 10-digit number that "popped" into the system which for some reason the dual computers could not recognize.

The 911 system has two computers, or switches, that route calls to operators, a redundancy that is supposed to prevent interruptions of service. If one switch gets overwhelmed or goes down, the other is supposed to take over.

But in this case, Mr. Full said, the switches began "handing off" the strange number to each other, essentially sending the system into a loop of "computer confusion."

The result is that some incoming calls -- but only those from landlines and then only some calls and not others -- could not get through.

The problem began about 1:41 p.m. and lasted until 8:05 p.m., but the center didn't know it until someone called on a cell phone at 4:30 p.m. to say they couldn't get through.

At about 6 p.m., four other people called on cell phones at the same time to complain about not getting through on landlines.

In some cases they said they heard ringing but never reached an operator, and in other cases they got a busy signal.

Between 100 and 200 calls were affected, a relatively small number compared to the 4,500 calls the center gets every day.

Mr. Full said technicians are going through stacks of computer printouts to identify all the numbers, where they came from and when they came in.

One of them came from the father of 5-month-old Alijah Schaffer of Stowe, who tried to call 911 after finding the baby unresponsive in his crib at about 5:30 p.m.

County Police Superintendent Charles Moffatt said the father couldn't get through, so he called local police. An ambulance came to the house and took the baby to Ohio Valley General Hospital, where Alijah was pronounced dead at 6:53 p.m.

The cause of death was undetermined yesterday. Superintendent Moffatt said the father found vomit in the baby's crib but there was none found in Alijah's throat.

Mr. Full said it's too early to tell if the 911 failure contributed to the death because of any delay in the emergency response to the home.

He said he was sympathetic to anyone who couldn't get through and said operators on duty Wednesday night also felt frustrated in not being able to answer calls.

"Fifty people here couldn't do their jobs," he said.

Mr. Full said the problem has been identified as the mystery 10-digit number, but why the system didn't recognize it is still unknown. He said the number did not come from someone calling the center but rather just appeared in the system.

"This was not a 911 call," he said. "We still have some unanswered questions. There are parts of this that are still under investigation."

He said he and county Chief Executive Dan Onorato have ordered a full investigation and the 911 center will issue a report, although he didn't say when that might happen.

The problem, he said, was "totally unrelated" to software glitches that caused a major crash of the system several years ago.

The 911 system has since been overhauled with redundant systems -- the two switches working in tandem -- to prevent any service interruptions. Mr. Full said the system is state-of-the-art.

But in this case, it didn't work.

"Quite frankly," he said, "we're disappointed."

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