Emergency 911 service is back online Friday in northern Wyoming after vandals cut a fiber line Monday, disrupting emergency calls in both Park and Big Horn counties.
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Lumen Technologies, the service provider, said the line was intentionally severed along a railroad track, though the exact location and motive remain unclear. The outage also affected hundreds of other customers, including KTVQ in Billings.
“When you call 911, time is of the essence,” said Monte McLain, Park County’s 911 manager. “For about a three-hour window, we had a single cell phone in the dispatch center, and that was the public’s only way to communicate with us.”
McLain said the outage started around 7:30 a.m. Monday. Initially, some were told it occurred just outside Cody, while others heard it happened in Casper. Regardless of the location, McLain believes the incident underscores a much larger problem: Wyoming’s emergency call infrastructure is decades old.
“We’re dealing with an antiquated system,” he said. “911 in Wyoming is using the same technology we’ve had since the 1970s — 57-year-old technology.”
The state’s current system relies on outdated copper lines. Park County officials have been pushing to move to a modern, next-generation platform that could reroute calls seamlessly during an outage.
“If this had been on a Next Gen platform, it could have routed the internet signal to Billings and back to us, and no one would have noticed,” McLain said. “Right now, I can’t transfer a 911 call across state lines. The technology doesn’t exist.”
During the outage, calls in Park and Big Horn counties were eventually rerouted south to dispatchers in Worland. While service has been restored, McLain says any such delay can have serious consequences.
“It slows response, and we don’t like that,” he said.
Lumen did provide a statement regarding to MTN regarding the discrepancies in the location of the fiber cut, saying, “As information can be dynamic during outages, details may change as we learn more about a specific incident, which may explain why there were initial discrepancies regarding the location."
