Lincoln County 911 files complaint against Frontier

LINCOLN COUNTY, WV (WOWK) – The Lincoln County 911 call center claims their phone service provider is slowing them down, prompting them to file a complaint against them.

On Sept. 6, Lincoln County Emergency Services Director Allen Holder filed a complaint against Frontier through the Public Service Commission.

The complaint regards a 14-hour outage on Aug. 12. According to Holder, their call center phone trunks were down. In other words, their isolated phone circuits that take 911 calls were down.

The outage was initially reported around 12:30 p.m. that day but was not resolved until about 2 a.m. the next day. Holder says Frontier originally claimed the outage was tied to a wire cut in Logan County. Holder insisted that could not be true due to the wire being located outside of their area.

In situations where a 911 call center goes down, Holder says calls are rerouted to call centers in other counties. That adds minutes to emergency response time, which Holder deems unacceptable.

“The 911 circuits coming into all the counties across West Virginia have become more and more unreliable. It’s not an issue of will the 911 service in your county, but it’s an issue of how often it goes down, and how long it will be down,” Holder said.

Holder filed a complaint in hopes that the Public Service Commission of West Virginia will take action against Frontier to prevent such outages from happening again and to create more reliable backup plans if it does.

“I would like to see Frontier fined to the point where it hurts,” Holder said. “Frontier has been playing games with 911 in this state for a long time. They’ve been playing games with the phone service in this state for a long time. It’s time they get serious and either take what they’re doing seriously and realize people’s lives are depending on it or do something else.”

Frontier has not responded to WOWK’s request for comment.

This comes under one year since ten county call centers filed a joint complaint against Frontier. The West Virginia 911 Council claimed that multiple call centers were unable to field 911 calls for ten hours at a time across a three-day period.

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