Nation's 911 system on the brink of its own emergency

Just after lunchtime on June 18, Massachusetts’ leaders discovered that the statewide 911 system was down.

A scramble to handle the crisis was on.

Police texted out administrative numbers that callers could use, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu gave outage updates at a press conference outlining plans for the Celtics’ championship parade, and local officials urged people to summon help by pulling red fire alarm boxes.

About 7 million people went roughly two hours with no 911 service. Such crashes have become more of a feature than a bug in the nation’s fragmented emergency response system.

Outages have hit at least eight states this year. They’re emblematic of problems plaguing emergency communications due in part to wide disparities in the systems’ age and capabilities, and in funding of 911 systems across the country. While some states, cities, and counties have already modernized their systems or have made plans to upgrade, many others are lagging.

911 is typically supported by fees tacked on to phone bills, but state and local governments also tap general funds or other resources.

“Now there are haves and have-nots,” said Jonathan Gilad, vice president of government affairs at the National Emergency Number Association, which represents 911 first responders. “Next-generation 911 shouldn’t be for people who happen to have an emergency in a good location.”

Meanwhile, federal legislation that could steer billions of dollars into modernizing the patchwork 911 system remains waylaid in Congress.

“This is a national security imperative,” said George Kelemen, executive director of the Industry Council for Emergency Response Technologies, a trade association that represents companies that provide hardware and software to the emergency response industry.

“In a crisis — a school shooting or a house fire or, God forbid, a terrorist attack — people call 911 first,” he said. “The system can’t go down.”

The U.S. debuted a single, universal 911 emergency number in February 1968 to simplify crisis response. But instead of a seamless national program, the 911 response network has evolved into a massive puzzle of many interlocking pieces. There are more than 6,000 911 call centers to handle an estimated 240 million emergency calls each year, according to federal data. More than three-quarters of call centers experienced outages in the prior 12 months, according to a survey in February by NENA, which sets standards and advocates for 911, and Carbyne, a provider of public safety technology solutions.

In April, widespread 911 outages affected millions in Nebraska, Nevada, South Dakota, and Texas. The shutdown was blamed on workers’ severing a fiber line while installing a light pole.

In February, tens of thousands of people in areas of California, Georgia, Illinois, Texas, and other states lost cellphone service, including some 911 services, from an outage.

And in June, Verizon agreed to pay a $1.05 million fine to settle a Federal Communications Commission probe into a December 2022 outage that affected 911 calls in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

The fires that raced across the Hawaiian island of Maui last August highlighted the critical importance of 911 systems. Dispatchers there fielded more than 4,500 contacts, meaning calls and texts, on Aug. 8, the day the fires broke out, compared with about 400 on a typical day, said Davlynn Racadio, emergency services dispatch coordinator in Maui County.

“We’re dying out here,” one caller told 911 operators.

But some cell towers faltered due to widespread service outages, according to county officials. Maui County in May filed a lawsuit against four telecommunications companies, saying they failed to inform dispatchers about the outages.

“If 911 calls came in with no voice, we would send text messages,” Racadio said. “The state is looking at upgrading our system. Next-generation 911 would take us even further into the future.”

Florida, Illinois, Montana, and Oklahoma passed legislation in 2023 to advance or fund modernized 911 systems, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The upgrades include replacing analog 911 infrastructure with digital, internet-based systems.

Instead of just fielding calls, next-generation systems can pinpoint a caller’s location, accept texts, and enable residents in a crisis to send videos and images to dispatchers. While outages can still occur, modernized systems often include more redundancy to minimize the odds of a shutdown, Gilad said.

Lawmakers have looked at modernizing 911 systems by tapping revenue the FCC gets from auctioning off the rights to transmit signals over specific bands of the electromagnetic spectrum.

But the U.S. Senate, in March 2023, for the first time allowed a lapse of the FCC’s authority to auction spectrum bands.

Legislation that would allocate almost $15 billion in grants from auction proceeds to speed deployment of next-generation 911 in every state unanimously passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee in May 2023. The bill, HR 3565, sponsored by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), would also extend the FCC’s auction authority.

Other bills have been introduced by various lawmakers, including one in March from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and legislation from Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) to extend the auction authority. For now, neither effort has advanced. Nine former FCC chairs wrote lawmakers in February, urging them to make 911 upgrades a national priority. They suggested Congress tap unspent federal covid-19 money.

“Whatever the funding source, the need is urgent and the time to act is now,” they wrote.

Ajit Pai, who served as chair of the FCC from 2017 to 2021, said outages often occur in older, legacy systems.

“The fact that the FCC doesn’t have authority to auction spectrum is a real hindrance now,” Pai told KFF Health News. “You may never need to call 911, but it can make the difference between life and death. We need more of an organized effort at the federal level because 911 is so decentralized.”

Meanwhile, some safety leaders are making backup plans for 911 outages or conducting investigations into their causes. In Massachusetts, a firewall designed to prevent hacking led to the recent two-hour outage, according to the state 911 department.

“Outages bring to everyone’s attention that we rely on 911 and we don’t think about how we really rely on it until something happens,” said April Heinze, chief of 911 operations at NENA.

Mass General Brigham, a health system in the Boston area, sent out emergency alerts when the outage happened letting clinics and smaller practices know how to find their 10-digit emergency numbers. In the wake of the outage, it plans to keep the backup numbers next to phones at those facilities.

“Two hours can be a long time,” said Paul Biddinger, chief preparedness and continuity officer at the health system.