Commissioners voted 5-0 at their regular meeting Tuesday to launch the separate investigations into Lumen and Windstream, the providers at the center of the outages, from the night of Aug. 31 to the morning of Sept. 1.
"The commission takes 911 matters seriously," said Tim Schram, the District 3 commissioner who represents Sarpy, Saunders and western Douglas counties on the body that regulates telecommunications carriers and oversees the state 911 department, among other duties.
"These investigations must provide answers," Schram said at Tuesday's meeting in downtown Lincoln, where the longtime commissioner thanked 911 dispatchers for working through the outages and the state's news outlets for keeping the public updated.
The first of the outages — which were unrelated but happened within days of each other — came at around 7 p.m. Aug. 31 when a contractor cut a cable in the Omaha area owned by Lumen, leaving 41 of Nebraska's 68 emergency communications centers unable to receive 911 calls, including Douglas and Sarpy counties, two of the state's three most populous counties.
During the outage, which lasted about 12 hours, callers who dialed 911 in the affected area received a busy signal and calls weren't delivered to 911 call centers, the Public Service Commission opening its investigation into Lumen.
The second outage started at around 6:30 p.m. Sept. 2 after a water leak and subsequent fire inside Windstream's electrical control room the night before had shut off commercial power to the building, leaving an on-site generator to take over supporting the three switches in the provider's Lincoln facility, according to a Windstream spokesman.
That generator failed sometime Sept. 2, forcing Windstream to resort to batteries to operate the three switches housed in the facility.
But the batteries dropped to "dangerously low voltage levels" the following evening, a spokesman said, prompting Windstream to shut down one of the three switches, interrupting services across Southeast Nebraska.Â
During the outage, calls to the affected 911 centers — 18 of the 20 centers connected to the Windstream system — were delivered either sporadically or not at all, the commission said in into Windstream.
"Our initial question is: what happened in this case?"Â Dave Sankey, the director of the state 911 department, said last week. "Where was the redundancy? Where was the diversity?"
The commission's probe of the Lumen outage will focus on the cause of the outage and why it resulted in the loss of 911 service "to such a large area of Nebraska," according to the order launching the investigation.
Commissioners are seeking "both an explanation of why the redundancy required of Lumen failed in this instance and a solution to prevent this from happening again," according to the order.
The investigation into Windstream, meanwhile, will in part examine why a fire and loss of electrical power at a single Windstream facility resulted in a loss of 911 service "to a large portion of southeast Nebraska," according to the written order.
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The commission is also seeking the same explanation from Windstream that it is from Lumen: Why did required redundancies fail and how can future failures be prevented?
In both cases, investigators will also explore whether customers of each provider — including the 911 centers they serve — received timely notification of the outages.
Mark Molzen, a spokesman for Lumen, which is based in Louisiana, said Tuesday the company will cooperate fully with the commission's investigation.
"We know that when someone calls 911, seconds count and we take that responsibility seriously," Molzen said in an email.
Scott Morris, a spokesman for Windstream, also said in an email Tuesday that the Arkansas-based telecommunications company stands "ready to engage constructively with the Nebraska Public Service Commission as it undertakes the" investigation.
"We are committed to providing robust, reliable communications services to our customers, as technology continues to transform and reshape the way Nebraskans access economic opportunities, educational resources, medical care and entertainment," Morris said.
Windstream has previously declined to answer specific questions about the service outage as the company conducts its own internal review of the incident.
The commission's vote to launch the parallel investigations into Windstream and Lumen come just over a week after Gov. Jim Pillen's office called for "a prompt and comprehensive inquiry" into the matter.
A spokeswoman for Pillen said last week the first-term governor "is troubled that this critical component of our public safety infrastructure has failed twice in such a short period of time."
The pair of outages come as the state rolls out a statewide upgrade of Nebraska's decades-old copper wire communications networks to a new emergency service system known as Next Generation 911 — .
The new system divides the state into seven Public Safety Answering Point regions, allowing every local 911 center in each region to remotely connect to two "host" centers — a system that would allow neighboring 911 centers to take over fielding emergency calls if a center lost power or service or had to evacuate.
Sankey said last week that state officials believed the 911 outages were the result of failures of the legacy 911 system — not the new one that Lumen is in the process of building across the state.
But in its written order made public Tuesday, the commission said the Lumen outage also impacted centers that had already connected the next generation 911 system Lumen is implementing.
"The commission seeks to understand why those (911 centers connected to the new system) did not experience the reliability, resiliency and redundancy expected from" the state's partnership with Lumen.
Where the investigations go from here depends in part on what regulators find.
A spokeswoman for the Public Service Commission said attorneys for the state agency will carry out the probe that could result in a public hearing or a written report, among other potential outcomes.