‘Superheroes’ at 911 call hub leaned on tech to help

WINNIPEG — Wednesday’s hours-long 911 outage in all of Manitoba except Winnipeg meant calls didn’t get through to employees in a public safety communications centre in Brandon as usual.

The centre, which handles 911 calls for police, fire and ambulance services outside the capital, wasn’t entirely in the dark, though, thanks to RapidSOS software that provides phone numbers, locations, subscriber information and other details from cellphone callers even when they are unable to connect.

“Every time somebody would try to call 911 and it would pop up on my staff member’s screen in real-time, my staff member would look at that and call the phone number back,” said Robert Stewart, who oversees the centre as the City of Brandon’s director of public safety communications.

“We would say, ‘Hey, I understand you were trying to phone 911, how can we help you?’ And then we would take care of them from there and get them the ambulance or the fire truck or the police that they needed.”

Stewart said the situation could have been “way worse” without the centre’s employees.

“My staff are superheroes. They were doing amazing work, making sure to followup and call everybody that they could in order to sort of mitigate some of the problem that was happening,” he said.

“Public safety communicators don’t get enough pats on the back for the work that they do.”

Bell Canada, which provides 911 service in Manitoba, said the outage was caused by a third-party fibre optic cable cut during construction near Winnipeg.

Stewart said nearly 90 calls were not routed to the centre as a result, with RapidSOS providing phone numbers for about half of them. The rest were potentially made from a landline, he noted.

The Brandon centre began using RapidSOS via a free subscription about one to two years ago. The software, which uses digital data, provides more precise locations than triangulated information from cell towers, Stewart said.

“It actually pings in our system on our third-party software just before it rings in our centre. That’s how quick RapidSOS has access to this,” he said.

RapidSOS allows users of certain smartphones to create profiles in an app and enter medical information or emergency contacts, which are automatically sent to a 911 communications centre, if it uses the software, when they call for help.

The storage or use of such information could raise privacy concerns. The RapidSOS privacy policy said users’ personal information is stored on secured servers, and third parties and partners are required to implement appropriate security and data protection measures.

Brandon Mayor Jeff Fawcett, who also praised staff for their response, said the use of the software — in preparation for next generation 911 service — allowed the centre to continue operations “to a good degree.”

Manitobans outside Winnipeg were advised to phone 10-digit numbers for their local police, fire or ambulance service if they were unable to get through to 911, or go to their nearest police, fire or ambulance station in an emergency.

The Rural Municipality of Gimli, through social media, text messages and other means, told residents to phone a local number that is used by fire Chief Mike Chudd.

“Probably less than an hour after that, we had a person call in saying there was a multi-vehicle collision on Highway 8,” Chudd said.

“They called me directly, just like we had intended the process to work. I was able to dispatch my members from there, and everything went pretty much as smooth as it could given the circumstances.”

No one was seriously injured in the crash, he said.

The situation reminded Chudd of days earlier in his career when 911 didn’t exist in rural areas and people had to call local numbers in an emergency.

“For me, to kind of formulate a reasonable workaround for a short term was pretty easy because of my past history,” he said. “It does show our reliance on technology and how redundancies would be a good thing.

“Having a good working relationship between not just fire departments, but most municipal services and their respective municipal offices, in situations like this means plans can come together very quickly for a short-term workaround. That’s what we did and we were able to do it very efficiently, quickly and effectively.”

Manitoba RCMP were not aware of any emergency response involving the police service that was adversely affected by the outage, spokesman Kevin Engstrom said.

Steinbach fire Chief Kelvin Toews said the city’s fire hall didn’t receive any calls during the outage.

“This is the first time during my time in the first service I’ve experienced this,” he said. “We were fairly quick in getting the information out that, first of all, they should try 911 first, and if they couldn’t get through to try our local fire hall. It ended up being, thankfully, uneventful at least in our area.”

» Winnipeg Free Press