Nine months after the first in a string of 911 phone service outages rattled Southeast Nebraska in August, the State 911 Department on Tuesday filed a formal complaint against one of the telecommunications providers at the center of the disruptions, which were the subject of a monthslong investigation.
Windstream, the Arkansas-based provider alleged to be responsible for three 911 service outages in Nebraska between September and January, could be ordered to pay millions of dollars in fines or have its carrier designation revoked as a result of the complaint filed Tuesday by David Sankey, the director of the State 911 Department.
The complaint — filed with the Public Service Commission, which closed its investigation into Windstream's service outages and , paving the way for Sankey's complaint — alleges that Windstream failed to comply with state and federal requirements governing the "operation, maintenance, reliability and functionality of 911 services."
As a result of those failures, Sankey alleged, state residents were "denied access to 911 services on three separate occasions," eroding public trust in Nebraska's 911 system.
In a statement Tuesday, a company spokesman said Windstream "is committed to being a reliable communications provider to Nebraskans, and we will continue to work with the commission on this matter."
Sankey's complaint allows the Public Service Commission — the state regulatory body that oversees numerous industries, including the telecommunications industry and the 911 department — to sit in a quasi-judicial capacity at a hearing scheduled for late August, when commissioners could decide whether and how to penalize Windstream for the outages.
The complaint's filing coincided Tuesday with the release of of the commission's investigation into Windstream, along with , that combine to offer granular details about what caused the company's service outages and what actions Windstream took in the wake of the disruptions.
Much of the probe seems to have focused on a Sept. 2 outage that regulators began investigating last fallÌý²¹²Ô»å held a public hearing over in December. The complaint into Windstream includes allegations stemming from the outages that occurred Nov. 28 and Jan. 13, which regulators also probed as part of their investigation into the company.
In the September instance — the longest-lasting of the company's three 911 service outages — a third-party contractor installing a natural gas line at Windstream’s data center in downtown Lincoln cut a city irrigation line, kicking off a chain of events that eventually led to 911 working either sporadically or not at all in Southeast Nebraska for several hours between Sept. 2 and 3.
Water from the sliced irrigation line found its way into the concrete vault housing Windstream’s electrical systems at 1440 M St. and onto a copper busbar, causing a short that ignited a fire and small explosion, leaving the facility without commercial power and reliant on a backup generator.
The generator — which company officials testified should have lasted for days — had been running for about 13 hours when a loose thermocouple wire erroneously signaled the generator was overheating and triggered an automatic shutdown at about 12:23 p.m. on Sept. 2.
The generator hadn't been inspected since 2018, said Brad Hedrick, Windstream’s regional president of operations for Nebraska, who maintained that the loose thermocouple wouldn’t have been discovered during routine maintenance.
The machine's failure forced 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.
At December's public hearing, Hedrick defended that decision, which he said helped avoid an equipment crash that he said could have “resulted in a catastrophic" failure that would have extended the duration of the outage.
But in the commission's findings released Tuesday, regulators concluded the "evidence indicates that Windstream had insufficient engineering and administrative procedures along with failing to conduct ongoing reviews to maintain adequate and reliable access to 911 services."
The commission's conclusion paved the way for Sankey's complaint, in which he accused Windstream of failing to identify "insufficient power back-up systems," among a slew of alleged shortcomings.
Sankey also alleged Windstream's engineering and administrative procedures failed to identify insufficient redundancies that ultimately allowed for a single point of failure to cause a broad 911 outage.
The Public Service Commission is scheduled to take up the complaint at a two-day hearing beginning Aug. 27, nearly a full year after the initial 911 outage.
The pace of the investigation had been a point of frustration for some state lawmakers dating back to December, when lawmakers questioned Sankey and commissioners over the "systemic" nature of the outages and the perceived slow-walking of the investigations into Windstream and Lumen, the other telecommunication provider at the center of 911 outages in Nebraska.
Sankey has not yet filed a complaint against Lumen, which like Windstream has been under investigation since September for its role in of the 911 centers in Nebraska on Aug. 31.
The repeated outages — there have been at least five disruptions to 911 services in Nebraska since late August — prompted lawmakers to this year requiring telecommunications providers that submit outage reports to the Federal Communications Commission to provide duplicate copies to Nebraska's Public Service Commission.
The change, which took effect in May, is meant to bring state regulators up to speed at the same time as federal regulators, who are owed reports within 30 days of a 911 service outage.
Windstream's office at 1440 M St. The State 911 Department filed a formal complaint Tuesday against Windstream over its alleged role in three 911 phone service outages dating back to September 2023.