Mayor now backs merging Pittsburgh's 911 with Allegheny County system

Thursday, May 23, 2002

By Lillian Thomas, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

The long-planned, long-delayed merger of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County 911 services was put back on track yesterday by Mayor Tom Murphy.

"We either need to spend a significant amount of money, $1.5 million to upgrade, or we can merge with the county, which is my recommendation," Murphy said at a news conference yesterday on the city's emergency preparedness plans. City Council must still approve the idea.

Negotiations to develop a city-county emergency operations center started in August 1997 and crystallized in an informal agreement that December. The city had planned to move into the county's new Point Breeze facility in October 1998, but the deal was called off following a dispute over the handling of a Downtown emergency a few months later. It came up again over the next few years but was put off.

An effort earlier this year failed over the issue of whether city employees would have to take a pay cut if the staffs were combined.

Calls for the merger were renewed after a failure in April of the city's system which is run by a 14-year-old computer called a Rockwell switch. The system also failed for several hours in 2000.

But city officials earlier this month said they planned to spend about $1.6 million to upgrade the system rather than merge with the county.

Yesterday, Murphy changed course and said a major stumbling block to the merger had been removed when the question of chain of command in an emergency was resolved. He said that the city and county have agreed that county emergency officials would fill that operational role.

Murphy's announcement came on the same day that Verizon, which owns the switching equipment, said it had completed an investigation of the April 28 failure and will submit a report Tuesday to the Federal Communications Commission.

A merger is not expected to alter service from the point of view of those who call 911; it would change the physical location of city dispatchers and put them on the county's computer call-switching system.

County Chief Executive Jim Roddey, a supporter of combining the operations, said that the county's Emergency Operations Center in Point Breeze was constructed to accommodate the city's 911 center moving there.

"We always anticipated the city joining us here. I'm pleased the mayor has made the recommendation and hope City Council approves it," Roddey said.

Asked if he had the votes from council to approve the merger, Murphy smiled.

"We'll see," he said.

The mayor's spokesman, Craig Kwiecinski, said that Murphy will be meeting with council members to discuss the issue.

City Councilman William Peduto, a member of a newly created 911 task force, said the group's first meeting is today. "I am assuming [the merger] will be the topic of discussion." The task force also includes City Council members Sala Udin and Bob O'Connor, Deputy Mayor Sal Sirabella, city Finance Director Ellen McLean and John Rowntree, communications chief for the city's 911 emergency operations center.

"I am fully behind a merger with the county's system," Peduto said.

The pressure to do something about the system was also increased by the fact that Rockwell had told Verizon that it would no longer provide service or parts for the switch after the end of this year.

Though the city and Verizon both said that the Rockwell switch was a reliable system, it is nearly the last of its kind. The Verizon report on the failure -- required by the FCC -- reveals some weaknesses of the system.

Most 911 centers, including Allegheny County's, use what's called a "dual-tandem" system, in which two separate computer systems share switching duties. When one goes down for any reason, the other takes over immediately.

Some other areas use Rockwells, but in tandem, with one system continuously backing up the other. Pittsburgh is the only major metropolitan area where Verizon that uses a single computer system, backed up by programming that routes calls into the 911 centers on the regular phone switching system.

A combination of a hardware failure in the primary system and a human programming error in the backup system were responsible for the four-hour outage last month, the company's analysis found.

An undetected programming error kept the backup system from switching calls into 911 centers after the main system crashed, leaving the city -- and also Lawrence County's 911 system -- without service from 2:05 to 6:08 p.m., said Verizon spokesman Lee Gierczynski.

"There was a defective power card that provided power to the switch," Gierczynski said. "The power card is a separate component like a circuit board." The power card had been functioning properly but failed that day.

Such a failure would not have been a problem normally; the backup system should have taken over while technicians replaced the board. That day, they replaced it at 4:02, about an hour and a half after the system crashed. But because the backup system failed, no calls were being processed during that time. And even after the primary system was ready to take over again, it took another two hours to get the calls rerouted from the failed backup to the main system.

The problem with the backup system failure was not solved until the next day, and it took another day to fix it.

The backup failed because a programming error prevented it from being able to recognize where incoming 911 calls were coming from. Because it didn't know where they came from, it didn't know whether to send them to the city or Lawrence County 911 center. Paralyzed, it treated them as errors. Callers got dead air, or, as unanswered calls piled up, a busy signal.

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