Pima County's 911 dispatchers used low-tech solution to cyber outage

Pima County Emergency Services’ dispatchers were forced by the global internet outage to deal with 911 calls the old-fashioned way — by writing them down on paper forms.

From about 10 p.m. Thursday to 4 a.m. Friday, the county’s online dispatch systems were down. But there were no big impacts to the actual 911 or 311 call systems themselves, officials said.

“The only thing that we had was that slight delay between getting a call from a call taker to a dispatcher,” said Alicia Rubio, a manager at the Public Safety Communications Department for the city of Tucson. Rubio says the web-based application for 311, See Click Fix, was also down and reports were done manually.

Officials say 911 call centers are well-equipped for these kinds of situations, and training is done periodically as a refresher for dispatchers.

“All of our trainees, like whenever they go to the academy, they learn how to keep track of all the deputies on a paper log and also enter information from callers on a paper card system that we keep track of,” said dispatch supervisor Joanne Amstutz. “We always have that system in place in case the computers go down unexpectedly.”

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While all Pima County emergency services were affected, the Valley Emergency Communication Center, which shares the same building, was not.

“There’s that certain software that was affected,” Amstutz said. “And whatever software that was, they don’t utilize that.”

Computers were back up as of late Friday morning and calls written on paper were being put into computer systems for electronic record keeping and transcripts. According to a news release, no law enforcement data was compromised or released.

Public safety officials remind people that emergency calls should be reported to 911 and non-emergency calls should be reported to 311 or the Tucson311 Portal app.