Though the Grand Forks County's 911 dispatch center and the East Grand Forks Police Department have both had phone troubles lately, emergency response has not been affected.
Grand Forks' 911 phone lines were down about 10 hours over Saturday night into Sunday morning, causing local 911 calls to be sent to Fargo's call center, said Becky Ault, director of Grand Forks' 911 call center.
The dispatch center has a server and a backup server, but when the first server failed Saturday night, the backup did not start either, Ault said.
"Sending our calls to Fargo, we had our backup to our backup working, basically," she said. "Our calls were being answered, it just wasn't on site." The problem occurred between about 8 p.m. Saturday to about 6:30 a.m. Sunday.
While Ault called the situation a "worst-case scenario," emergency calls were not delayed. Some internal calls were affected, though, she said.
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The dispatch center will probably replace its server, but it shouldn't cost the city or county any money because of a five-year maintenance contract, Ault said.
The reason for the server's failure was still unknown Monday afternoon.
In East Grand Forks, the police department's phones have also been off-three times in the past few weeks, Police Chief Michael Hedlund said.
None of the problems have been connected, he said. The phones were down for about half an hour Monday because of nearby construction work, and earlier the city experienced a power outage.
Emergency response has not been affected, since East Grand Forks' 911 calls are sent through the Polk County dispatch center, Hedlund said.
