Phones down at 911 center

MOSES LAKE - A truck reportedly slid into a power pole early Friday near Moses Lake, triggering an outage that brought down 911 phone lines at Grant County's emergency dispatch center.

Power was also out for about 300 homes near Moses Lake, said Grant County PUD spokesperson Dorothy Harris.

Power came back on for different parts of the affected area between three to 10 hours after crews first responded at 1:10 a.m.

Call center operations for the Multiagency Communications Center, or MACC, were moved to a backup center about 19 miles away at the Grant County Sheriff's Office in Ephrata, said Sam Lorenz, Grant County Emergency Management director.

Employees at the sheriff's office handled calls at the Ephrata backup center until dispatchers from Moses Lake arrived.

Callers were routed to the Ephrata backup center and 911 operators dispatched the calls from radios in Moses Lake, he said. Dispatchers at the two centers were communicating with each other by radio.

Lorenz said phone problems at MACC started at 12:18 a.m., but 911 service was never down.

A backup generator turned on automatically when the power went out, he said.

The generator can run for days and there's an agreement in place with Grant County Fire District No. 5 to deliver fuel to supply it if needed, he said.

"They followed their procedures and everything worked great," Lorenz said of the dispatch center.

A phone company representative drove from Idaho to Moses Lake to work on the phone system after power was restored, Lorenz said.

It wasn't clear Friday what time the work was done or exactly how long the phones were down.

But Lorenz did say the Ephrata backup center was closed after the power came back on at the main dispatch center in Moses Lake.

The stop and street lights at the intersection of Highway 17 and Patton Boulevard were also not working during the outage, Lorenz said.

The power pole that was reportedly struck by a truck before the outage was near Broad Street and Roberts Place, which is an area near Airway Drive, Harris said.

The utility's crews responded to the outage at 1:10 a.m. and power for some homes was turned back on at 4:15 a.m.

Some homes lost power again because the system was overloaded, likely from electrical items not being shut off during the outage, she said. Most people were likely asleep when the outage occurred, she said.

Crews went back out and drove along the power lines to make sure there wasn't another problem, she said.

Nearly all of the 300 customers had power about 8 a.m. Friday she said.

The last few homes in the Stonecrest Drive and Bouldercrest Road N.E. areas near Moses Lake had power turned on at 10:15 a.m.