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Phone Lines Down at Police Department: 911 Calls Not Affected By Outage

Posted on: Thursday, 23 February 2006, 09:00 CST

By Sergio Chapa, The Brownsville Herald, Texas

Feb. 23--February 23, 2006 - A busy signal was all most callers heard when they dialed the Brownsville Police Department's non-emergency lines Tuesday through late Wednesday. Although 911 services were not affected, department officials said their phone system's power surge protector failed, knocking out their business lines at about 8:30 p.m. Tuesday. The lines were still out of order at press time. Cmdr. Roberto Avitia said department employees have been work-ing with telephone service providers since Tuesday to restore service to their non-emergency lines. In the meantime, Avitia said department employees are using cell phones to send and receive non-emergency calls. "It hasn't interfered with our response time," Avitia said. Department officials said Tuesday's incident is the second time in three months time that an equipment failure has caused their non-emergency lines to go down. The agency received 138,627 calls for service last year -- an aver-age of 380 calls per day, according to the Brownsville Police Depart-ment's 2005 Annual Crime Report. Avitia said the department uses telephone service from Southwest-ern Bell but might have outgrown its 13-year-old equipment from Verizon. Police figures show that calls for service have consistently re-mained at more than 110,000 calls per year since 2001. "We're going to take a look at upgrading what equipment we have," Avitia said. "We've learned from what happened and will prevent it from happening again."

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Brownsville Herald, Texas

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Source: The Brownsville Herald

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