Grant County 911 Service Restored

From a press release - Shortly after 1:00 p.m. Thursday, the Multi Agency Communications Center experienced an outage due to our emergency power system being in bypass mode at the same time that an oversized truck clipped power lines near I-90 milepost 188 causing a power outage to our entire facility. All equipment at MACC briefly lost power. The Grant County PUD system quickly rerouted power within minutes and MACC began coming back online.

As per our emergency plans, we also sent Dispatchers to our back-up facility in Moses Lake in order to continue operations for our community. Those Dispatchers - within ten minutes of the power outage - activated the equipment at our back-up facility around the same time systems at our main facility were coming back online. All systems have been restored.

Normally, when power outages occur, our uninterruptible power supply (UPS) immediately provides power to all critical systems. What occurred today was a "Perfect Storm" as our UPS was in bypass mode for regularly scheduled maintenance.

This incident did allow us to use our emergency plans, and I want to express my admiration and thanks for all the Dispatchers and MACC staff who were working today. This was a condition which could rarely happen, and you all performed as professionals.

In addition, when our facility went offline, Grant County 911 calls were redistributed to other nearby 911 centers, who answered our calls and then passed the information on to us so we could send help. We appreciate those partnerships and thank the Dispatchers at the Washington State Patrol and the Adams County Sheriff's Office for their help today.

We apologize for the interruption in service to our citizens and responders. This was something that we feel can rarely happen, but you can have the confidence in knowing that when something like this happens, we have plans and people in place to make sure your 911 call brings the help you need.