Local dispatchers dealing with cellular outage

This morning’s cellular outage had wide ranging impacts for some emergency dispatchers here in South Mississippi.

Harrison County Emergency Dispatchers say many calls did not go through this morning, even though the dispatch system does not operate on AT&T.

Harrison County Sheriff Matt Haley says the outage made dispatching and communications difficult for hours on end. “Someone will call 911 and you can’t hear anything in the background. Fortunately for us, there is a system set in place. It’s a rapid SOS system and we’re able to, most of the time, pinpoint where that 911 call came from. To add to it, we have to send officers out to that location, you know, sometimes it ends up being a valid 911 and sometimes it’s not. So anytime any form of communication goes down, it just makes our job that much harder.”

Sheriff Haley says if you are still having trouble reaching emergency dispatchers, attempt to reach a landline or flag someone down if possible.