The Hays County central dispatch center was temporarily disabled by a cut fiber optic cable. In this file photo, Courtney Anderson, a 911 dispatcher at the Hays County Sheriff's Office, answers incoming calls. (file photo by Sean Kimmons)
by BRAD ROLLINS
A construction mishap that plunged much of Hays County and surrounding areas into a partial communications blackout for more than eight hours on Saturday passed without emergency in the Kyle and Buda areas.
A crew installing a fire hydrant near IH-35 in the Buda area severed an AT&T fiber optic cable at about 1:15 p.m., shutting down 911 systems in Hays and Caldwell counties until backup systems were activated.
Dispatch centers – maintained by Hays County and the Kyle, San Marcos and Texas State University police departments – are equipped with backup systems that automatically roll over calls to a nearby communications center in the event of failure, said Ken Bell, the San Marcos emergency operations manager who fields technical problems for agencies countywide.
In this case, incoming calls were being forwarded to centers that were also down, creating a period of no more than a half-hour when emergency calls were not answered at all, Bell said.
By 2 p.m., emergency calls were being rerouted to Travis and Guadalupe counties whose dispatchers relayed information to first responders in the field, Bell said.
“It was a catastrophic event but people managed it well. We have processes that we practice for emergency events that went into effect. It wasn’t like nobody knew what to do,” Bell said.
Neither the Buda fire nor police departments nor the Kyle police department chiefs reported problems dispatching officers, firefighters or medics to incoming calls for service.
The fiber cut also disrupted service to AT&T and other carriers’ cell phones and some ATM and credit card machines. Most, but not all, land telephone lines were not affected. The fiber optic cable was patched and the system restored to normal by 9 p.m., Bell said.
Communication blackouts, though usually not as widespread, occur periodically when a fiber optic cable is severed, usually in the course of other construction. Construction related to the new Cabela’s in Buda severed the same AT&T line more than once in 2004 and 2005, Bell said.
The mayhem that can result from damage to a single cable concerns emergency management officials, Bell said.
“We’ve been talking about this for years. This is a national issue: being able to identify these vulnerabilities and fixing them for the future,” Bell said, adding, “The magnitude of this particular event is of such scale that we’re going to be doing some followup.”
