MINOT – After 9-1-1 experienced an outage for Verizon customers in Minot for a while Monday morning, Minot Chief of Police John Klug addressed the issue at the City Council meeting.
“The outage was only for Verizon customers,” said Klug. “If they called they’d get a fast busy signal and it wouldn’t go through.”
Klug said the Police Department was notified of the problem at 11:36 a.m. Monday.
“What we’ve learned since then is there was a fiber cut near Tower City that was on a railroad right-of-way underwater,” said Klug. “So, there is a crew on site working on repairing the fiber. Like all the other times at the exact same time there was a hardware outage at another location, so that eliminated the backup plan that is in place.”
Klug said as of 6:25 p.m. Monday, Verizon emailed the department that it has a temporary fix in place.
“When people call 9-1-1 now, it rings through, but it goes to our admin lines,” said Klug. “At least we can answer those lines and get people help as needed. As in the past these problems are starting to reach the governor’s office and I would anticipate that there would be some investigation into exactly what took place.”
