AKRON, Ohio — A burst pipe at AT&T’s downtown Akron switching office knocked out 911, land line and cellular phone service to many customers in Medina, Portage, Stark and Summit counties Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning.
All services impacted are restored, according to AT&T spokeswoman Holly Hollingsworth on Wednesday afternoon.
The 911 service went down at about 6:15 p.m. Tuesday night.
Valerie Derose, from the Summit County Emergency Management office, “All of a sudden, everything went quiet. We all realized no one was talking.”
Summit County set up an operations center at the City of Stow’s police station. Stow still had phone service. A team of communications experts got incoming calls after word went out that people with emergencies should call an alternate number.
They used handheld radios that are a part of the county’s Universal Radio Network to reach first responders and communicate with hospitals and continue to deliver emergency services.
The City of Akron said on Wednesday morning that residents may have difficulty contacting downtown Akron offices and accessing the city’s web services. “Please be patient as AT&T workers are addressing the issue,” the news release read.
Hollingsworth said a burst steam pipe in their Akron switching office led to the outage.
Mike Scott with the Akron Fire Department said the burst pipe sprayed water over electrical equipment.
The six-story building, located on Bowery Street, is equipped with backup generators, but they were of no help. Battery backup systems failed as well. As a result, phone lines and cell service went down.
Scott said all new electrical equipment, including at least one generator, had to be brought in to help and that an emergency command center had been set up as well.
An AT&T source who said he was not authorized to talk said “it is a lot more complicated” than bringing in a generator. He said communicating within the communications company has been tough because they do not have phones to talk with each other.
Steve Kristan, AT&T’s director of external affairs, joined officials at the operations center. He said a team of 45 experts from all over the state was brought in to deal with the system’s failure.
Kristan said there’s a meeting Thursday to re-group and discuss what worked, what didn’t work and what can be done better to prevent something like this from happening again.
There were widespread reports of disruption to other AT&T services during the phone outage, including the company’s Internet and cable television services.
The AT&T outage disrupted phone service at Kent State University, including emergency services.