Chemung County 911 system failures blamed on battery issue

CHEMUNG COUNTY, N.Y. (WETM) – Two recent failures involving Chemung County’s 911 system are being blamed on a battery problem at a radio tower.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, 18 News learned 911 operators lost the ability to use their radio equipment at their desks. They could still reach first responders on mobile radios and phones.

All volunteer firefighters were told to man their stations during the nearly 8-hour outage. Four days later, Undersheriff Douglas Houper told 18 News another malfunction caused “some police and fire radios to be ineffective.” At a legislative committee meeting Monday night, Undersheriff Houper gave a nearly 40-minute explanation on what went wrong.

“The first thing I want to tell you is, we didn’t really have an outage. The radios were up and running. It was the connection between Hawley Hill tower and 911,” the Undersheriff told legislators.

“I had Motorola come in; they did big research into the investigation on why this happened. They believe there was an outage at Hawley Hill. Everything in the shelter up there has a battery backup that keeps everything alive until the generator starts, supposedly. What they determined is, hey, it’s time for you to replace these batteries. I said, ok, if that’s what needs to be done, we’re going to do that. So, we’re in the process right now, an emergency order, we’re going to get Hawley Hill taken care of first. We’re hoping this will alleviate this issue,” Houper added.

“So that happened on a Saturday night on a holiday weekend. Come Wednesday, all of a sudden it goes down again. Luckily, Motorola was one County over, they came and handled it. What I found out was, my generator was doing its weekly tests and cut the power to start the generator and then we had that failure again. But again, the microwave loop is still working. It’s just that connection to the 911 Center here at City Hall that got interrupted. So they were able to quickly fix it and we were up and running again.”

“The only question I still have for Motorola is, ok, when the power went out, we lost that connection. But when the power was reintroduced, why didn’t that connection happen. They have not figured out why yet.”

“Knock on wood, we didn’t have any major calls that night,” Houper added.

Undersheiff Houper said the public was never at risk. He says replacing all the radio tower batteries could be finished within three years. Houper says the County is also asking Motorola to provide a new backup system if the same issues happen again.

You can watch Undersheriff Houper’s full explanation to legislators below:

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