Atlanta’s E911 Communications Center temporarily lost power for an undisclosed amount of time Thursday night, yet operators remained able to answer and dispatch emergency calls.
Atlanta police announced the outage in a news release, saying the power flickered and a backup battery system failed to activate. The outage impacted the server, but did not affect the city’s ability to handle calls.
Officials didn’t say how long the power outage lasted, or why the backup generator failed. The center had returned to normal operations by 11:30 p.m. Thursday, police said.
“We have contingencies in place to ensure we maintain emergency services, even while experiencing issues like this,” a spokesperson said.
Atlanta 911 operators field more than 1 million emergency and non-emergency calls per year, according to official statistics.
It’s not the first time in recent memory the E911 Communications Center has been hit with a power outage.
A power loss at the call center Nov. 22 forced police commanders to transfer the 911 operations to Fulton County. And on Nov. 8, a water leak forced the city to activate the 911 center’s backup generators.
— Please return to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for updates.
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