Phone Lines Affecting Personal Emergency Response Systems

When phone lines go down, it’s inconvenient. But for those who rely on systems that call for help in an emergency, it can be very dangerous.
The telephone lines at the Grundy County Courthouse and the Grundy County Law Enforcement Center have been down since Monday with only the 911 number and a fax line able to receive calls. While that has been inconvenient for those who use personal emergency response systems, there was concern about how help could be reached in the case of an emergency.
One local provider of such services noted that while the 911 system has been in working condition, a call from one of their response systems is routed to Massachusetts, where an operator at that location sends the call to the non-emergency number at the Grundy County dispatch center. If that operator was to call 911, the call would go to a 911 dispatch center in Massachusetts.
Fortunately, a fax line in the dispatch center has been working during the outage and plans were made on Tuesday for those calls for assistance to be routed to that number.
Grundy County Presiding Commissioner Rick Hull said the module for the phone system, which is about 10 years old, is obsolete and parts are very hard to find. It was hoped that the part needed to fix the power supply to the system can be found and repairs made today. Hull said the county is in the process of finalizing plans for a new phone system, which will be web-based and cloud-based.