Portland area 911 centers dealing with system outages before potential winter storm

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) -- As winter weather moves in this week, some local agencies are dealing with an outage impacting their 911 centers.

This is affecting Washington, Clackamas, and Columbia counties, as well as Lake Oswego, after a routine maintenance outage didn't come back online like it was supposed to.

Early Wednesday morning, the computer-aided dispatch systems for four Portland-area 911 centers went down for routine software patching, which normally lasts about half an hour. Instead, something went wrong – which technicians are still looking into – and the outage still hasn't been fixed as of Wednesday evening.

"It only impacts, basically, the computer software for the dispatchers. The telephone 911 system is not impacted, radio systems are not impacted," Mike Fletcher, executive director of Columbia 911, said. "We're going back to old-school dispatching."

The outage is in a software system that dispatchers use when uploading and sending information out to police, fire, and medical. This type of outage is also something they frequently train for.

In the meantime, as they use an older CAD system that adds some manual work for dispatchers, they say it's not impacting the time response or answering of 911 calls.

"This just affects the way dispatchers are entering information into the computer for sending to officers and firefighters and things like that," Lake Oswego Police Dept. Sgt. Tom Harper said. "They can still go on their computer, on their maps, see where officers are and that kind of stuff. The challenge comes in with on a normal day, for example, when an officer is dispatched to a call, information about that call is sent to the computer in their car, so they can just read the information that's in the call on their computer, whereas, now, what they're doing is they're getting that on the radio or they call dispatch and get the information, the full information about the call."

However, KOIN 6 asked local 911 centers what would happen if the outage continues, especially as an influx of calls could come in during forecasted winter weather this week.

"The event is in the back of our minds. Right now, everything is operating normally call volume-wise, but we're aware that we're coming into a weather event or at least a potential one," Fletcher said.