UPDATE: Thurston County 911 dispatch unable to receive landline calls for hours Tuesday

Thurston County’s 911 dispatch center was unable to receive some emergency calls from landline phones for hours Tuesday morning.

The outage intermittently prevented callers using landlines from connecting to the center’s central office.

From around 4 to 6:30 a.m., the center phone system would not accept those calls, with callers instead hearing a fast busy signal indicating they should hang up and call again.

Keith Flewelling, executive director of Thurston County 9-1-1 Communications, said the cause of the outage is still under investigation but “our working assumption right now is our central office ... failed some how to deliver 911 calls from landlines.” Unlike cellphones, landlines have to go through the central office at a dispatch center.

Flewelling says the situation could have been a lot worse, but since most calls come from cellphones, “I don’t think we lost any 911 calls.”

The county announced at about 10 a.m. Tuesday that the 911 center was again able to receive landline calls.

This story was originally published August 17, 2021 at 7:21 AM.